Schwarzkopf: Well, Colin and I had just had another discussion about what is the end game. He had asked me about an offensive option, what we would have t to kick the Iraqis out of Kuwait and I had showed him the only possible alternative that we had with the number of forces that were going to be committed. And I told him that I didn't think it could be done,unless a lot more decisions were made.

And of course, up until that time, there had been no indication of kicking Iraq out of Kuwait, it was more defending Saudi Arabia. So when the President got up and gave the speech that he did on the 16th, I looked at Colin and Colin looked at me, because we were both quite surprised with the vigour of the speech and the indications that, you know, either they get out or we kick them out type of an approach, because neither of us at that point had gone that far in our thinking.

At that point our thinking was totally defensive, everything I had briefed had been defensive and I had been very careful to point out at Camp David that this is what it takes to defend, this is not what it takes to attack and so, therefore, when the conversation went from stopping them, to ejecting them, we were talking about an entirely different type of military operation.

Q: You contacted the Pentagon and said, "Hey, let's get some work done on this" and John Warden came to see you. What appealed to you about what John Warden showed you?

Schwarzkopf: As the events of August unfolded, we had the hostage situation where they'd taken Americans and Europeans as hostages and were placing them on strategic targets. We also had the Embassies surrounded and the Embassy staffs inside the Embassies and very much in danger.

And people were publicly saying, you know, "Nothing had better happen to the hostages, nothing had better happen to our Embassies, they invade our Embassies that's an act of wa and they'll pay a terrible price for that."

And it suddenly dawned on me that I had no military options or very, very limited military options, to offer the President so I called up Colin Powell and said, you know, "We need to think this through because, if, in fact, they do invade the Embassy or if, in fact, they do start executing hostages and we want to retaliate, I need a package of retaliation options that I can offer to the President of the United States, and let him pick from this array as to what he might want to do."

So, I asked Colin to allow me to work directly with the air staff to develop a package of options. Based upon that conversation, John Warden came down to my headquarters and we met.

Now at the same time, I was also starting to get questions, more questions about an offensive option, so John briefed me on an array of air targets and a strategic air campaign that could be targeted against strictly military or military-related targets.

And they were in packages. We had a package that were transportation targets, a package of nuclear targets, a package of chemical targets, a package of leadership targets, and this sort of thing, and had all of these various packages from which we could have selected individually or we could have selected to... chosen to execute an entire package. But putting it altogether, it was a very, very attractive strategic air campaign.

I then realise, sitting in that room, that this strategic air campaign would have to be a precursor to any offensive campaign. So, in conversations with John, we carried this a step further, calling this phase one, and I said, "Now what would we have to do, you know, if we wanted to invade Iraq?"

And so we very quickly came up with this four phased campaign, where phase one was the strategic air campaign, phase two was we move it down into Kuwait to eliminate the air defences, number three we start to attrition the Iraqi military forces to get the numbers down to more in order of what we wanted, and then phase four was the offensive ground campaign.

And those four phases held throughout the entire planning of the war subsequently, it was a four-phased offensive campaign, always with the strategic air campaign being a stand along campaign that we could execute without executing phase two, three and four, if we so desire.

Q: Did you ever have any doubts about bombing Iraq itself or was it a case of, this ain't gonna be Vietnam?

Schwarzkopf: I had no doubt at all that we would bomb Iraq if I was going to be the Military Commander.

Again, the whole point of studying Iraq had been to come up with its strengths and weaknesses and our strengths and weaknesses and to devise a strategy which allowed us to use our strengths against their weaknesses.

And obviously one of the very, very great strengths that we had was our ability with strategic air power and tactical air power. And one of his very great weaknesses vis a vis our strength was his very, very weak air force.

It would have been absolutely stupid to go into a military campaign against his forces who had a tremendous advantage on us on the ground, numbers wise, and said, "OK, we'll only fight this battle on the ground, we won't fight it in the air." That would have been ludicrous.

Q: How important was your support in making this happen?

Schwarzkopf: I think probably more important was the fact that Colin Powell completely understood the importance of this and we, as a team, were solidly behind it.

I would also tell you that anyone who received a briefing on that plan came away very impressed with the significance of the plan and, there was more to it than just a plan.

For the first time we had a capability to focus on military targets and avoid civilian areas. So there was a degree of discrimination within the execution of the plan that made it much more palatable than it would have been, something like the firebombing of.. of Tokyo or something like that, that was just an indiscriminate destruction of the entire city.

Q: Did you ever see a strategic air campaign as the total way of getting Iraqis out of Kuwait, full stop?

Schwarzkopf: It was an option but I have never felt that it was the complete option. I always felt that it would take ground forces on the ground to, in fact, eject the ground forces that were over there.

Q: Let's talk now about the offensive. Could you describe how, on October the 6th, Colin Powell called you to say, "Send a briefing team" and your reaction to this?

Schwarzkopf: The forces that we had on the ground in early October were the forces that we required to defend Saudi Arabia, to give a guaranteed defence of Saudi Arabia.

I had tried every way I could to make it very clear to everyone in Washington that were we required to go on the offence, it would require more forces. One of the standard rules of warfare is the attacker should outnumber the defender, a minimum of three to one and if it gets a strongly fortified position, five to one.

And, of course, the ratios were just the other way around, they were outnumbering us by about three to one, or five to one. And they, at that time, were developing very strong defensive positions with barbed wire, with minefields, with this sort of thing.

So your simple mathematics said that, you know, if we were going to conduct, an offensive operation, it would be... it would require more force.

Colin called me in early October and said, "I want you to send a briefing team back to the White House to brief the air campaign." Because I had come over there, I had seen the subsequent air campaign, after Chuck Horner and Buster Glosson had taken over and they'd come in and laid it all out before me. And I was so very impressed with it, I called back and said, "Look, this is absolutely sensational and this will do the trick, this is just the kind of air campaign we need to have, and you need to let people see this."

Colin saw it, he was very impressed with it. And so, therefore, I think he wanted to I think he wanted to show it to the White House to make the White House feel good.

So he said, "I want you to send a team back, with the, air campaign." And then he said, "And I also want you to send an offensive option back." And I objected strongly. I said,"Look, I've told everybody all along we do not have the forces on the ground to conduct an offensive option, and if we do conduct it there is only one possibility and that's a penetration right to the heartland of Kuwait where we will sit and we may accomplish all of our objectives and get to that point and then if the Iraqis choose to reinforce, we're out of options, we have no reserve, we have no other forces over here and we could be destroyed."

And Colin said,"I understand that and you've made it clear to me and what I want you to do is present this offensive option anyhow so we can show the White House exactly what it is we're dealing with."

I was still very uneasy about that. So, what I did was, I sent Bob Johnson, my Chief of Staff back. But before I did, I said to Bob, "These are the last two charts I want you to show the President and that is this is the offensive option, it's the only one we could conduct at this time with these forces. But I do not recommend this course of action. It is the wrong course of action, if we're going to attack, we need to attack the proper way."

Q: What did the final slide say in this briefing?

Schwarzkopf: The final slide said, This plan is not recommended and if you do want to eject the Iraqis out of Kuwait it will take considerably more force on the ground than we presently have."

Q: Buster Glosson and Joe Purvis both remember you saying that, "Stick to this brief, though don't over-emphasise it, otherwise I'll terminate your military career!" You wanted to get this message across. Why were you so insistent about that?

Schwarzkopf: It was very important to me that my views as the theatre Commander be presented just as they were. Obviously I knew at this table there were going to be a lot of outsiders sitting around, there were gonna be a lot of other people. Many times in the past, military decisions had been influenced bypeople within the government who have no military training whatsoever.

So, I just wanted to be absolutely sure that the President understood that although I was asked to give an offensive option and this would be the way that we would do it if we had to do it with what we had on the ground, but I absolutely did not recommend that course of action and that was not what I felt needed to be done.

AndI didn't want that position waffled or equivocated or changed. I didn't want the briefers--because they were receiving pressure from all sides-- to cave in and say, "Well, OK, I think we could do it" or anything, you know, that wasn't their purpose. They were the briefers, they were there to brief my position.

As a matter of fact, I had originally volunteered to go back to Washington myself. I said, "This is so important that I would like to come back and give this briefing."

And Colin felt that my arrival in Washington DC could not be done in secret and that that would gin up a whole great deal of speculation within the Washington community as to why I was there and, therefore, he said, "No, I'd rather you stay behind." And therefore I sent my Chief of Staff to give the briefing.

Q: When did you first realise that things had gone badly, that some of the political figures, General Scowcroft, in particular, but also Bob Gates, Dick Cheney has also told me he thought "Hey diddle, diddle, up the middle" was his description; they've all took it as you gaming them .... When did you first begin to realise something had gone wrong?

Schwarzkopf: Well, Colin reported back to me almost immediately that, the briefing on the air campaign had gone wonderfully, the briefing on the ground campaign had gone terribly.

And you know, he confirmed all of my worst suspicions because the information he gave me is as the briefers were going on with the plan, it was constantly being interrupted and people were interjecting in there, "Well, that doesn't make sense and you can't do this and you shouldn't that ..."

And they were never allowed to present their complete briefing before the entire, you know, before they were already debunked. And in fact, my last disclaimer, by the time the disclaimer came up, it really didn't carry very much weight because, by that time, everybody around the table said, "Oh, this is a terrible plan"

Given the forces that we had on the ground and the forces that we were facing on the opposite side and the type of positions we were facing, it wasn't a terrible plan, it was the only plan. There was no other way we could have possibly conducted that military operation other than the way it was presented to them at that time.

Q: Why do you think they got the wrong end of the stick?

Schwarzkopf: I don't know. I don't know again what introduction was given to the plan. I wasn't there and, as I say, hindsight being 20/20, I wished, I still wish that I had been there for that presentation because I probably would have introduced it from the standpoint of, you know, this is not a recommended plan, it's the only way it could be done under these circumstances.

I wasn't confident with it at all and we had not developed our offensive option to the extent that I wanted it developed. We just in the process of it and when told we have to present something, this was all we had to present.

There was absolutely no gamesmanship involved in this at all none whatsoever. This was not a "Throw 'em the worst case and therefore they will give us more people ..." there was none of that at all.

It was the only plan that was available at that time that, that could have... could have met with any success whatsoever.

And that isn't just my opinion. I mean, I was not working on this plan in isolation by myself, quite the contrary. This was the opinion of all of the military experts that were involved in bringing this plan together..

Q: You must have thought long and hard about this -- as to why they took it this way. The only reason, I can assume, is that, they were aware.--General Scowcroft, Bob Gates, Dick Cheney to a lesser extent--were aware that Colin Powell had reservations, Colin Powell made no secret of the fact that he wanted containment to carry on. What do you think was the reason that these highly intelligent people got the wrong end of the stick?

Schwarzkopf: If you examine the options... that are available in the broadest of terms for the attack, there are really only three options.

Option number one is a frontal attack across the entire front... That's a very costly option when you're facing a huge, overwhelming force ..

Option number two is an envelopment. Either single or double envelopment, where you... whip around behind them into the rear... Requires highly mobile forces... and sufficient forces so that when they get back there, they're capable of defending themselves. And when you do that, you also require a fixing force. Because if you don't fix the forces that are on the front line, they can all turn around and go back there against the envelopment.

And option number three is a penetration, where you select a given point in the line, and then you concentrate your forces there, so your forces are stronger than the forces you're opposing there, and you punch through and try and get into his rear. And succeed that way.

I think the people at the table quite frankly just don't understand that. And therefore when they see a penetration, going right to a piece of strategic terrain north of Kuwait City, they find it unimaginative. They probably are displaying their lack of knowledge of... military options.

Q: Dick Cheney told me the whole point of the Western Excursion and so on, was to get the message across to the military, that this war was going to have to happen--if it had to happen, that he wanted to get the message across that this was serious.

Schwarzkopf: Nobody had to deliver any messages to me that this was a serious business. Because, having been through what I'd already been through in Washington before I ever left, I realised that one day there would come that requirement for us to perhaps have to eject the Iraqis out of Kuwait.

I was very confident of the defensive plan because we'd been working on that for over a year in our headquarters. We had not been working on any offensive plan at all - none.

So when I arrived in country, my first priority with my planners is we have to get cranking on an offensive option. And, the offensive option was preoccupying my thinking, and everybody else in my headquarter's thinking for a very very long time.

Not because we were sure that we were going to have to execute it, but because if the President of the United States... and all the rest of the world leaders turned around and said "Execute your offensive option!" I obviously had to have one.

It's the same type of thinking that went into the decision that led to the strategic air campaign. I recognised that if something were to happen, I had to have a military option to present... And that's exactly what we were doing in this case.

Q: Final question in this area...Colin Powell phoned you, and you were furious and you said "Look we don't need to go on, we don't have a concept, we don't have a concept of how we're going to conduct this operation." What was going on?

Schwarzkopf: The frustration was, that based upon all the work we had done, the only viable offensive plan we could come up with was this penetration. Yet it was a very high risk military operation. It was very dependent upon several things turning out positively, any one of which had gone wrong, would have stopped us dead in our tracks. And it also could have been a very, very high, casualty-producing type operation.

So. Yes, we had an offensive plan. Did we have a viable offensive plan? Absolutely not, in my viewpoint. So when Colin called and said... you know, I said "We're not prepared to do this!" And Colin said "You have to do it!" I of course was very frustrated, because I did not under any circumstances I didn't want to present the plan. It's just that simple. Because it was not a plan that I recommended and as I said, I made it very clear to my briefers that I wanted them to say that.

Q: You won the argument. How do you describe the phone call-- Colin Powell telling you that you'd got the extra forces, and what your reaction to that was?

Schwarzkopf: Well, it wasn't shortly thereafter. It was quite sometime after that..... Colin came to visit my headquarters. We had extensive briefings and by this time I had gone ahead ---- because after the Washington briefing the question had come back to me: "Okay, what do you need? And if you had the forces what would you do?"

And I said "Fine, I can show you that in a heartbeat." So we really had two plans: what we called the One Corps option and the Two Corps option. And the Two Corps option was essentially fix the forces in place using One Corps and the Arab forces, and do the envelopment. The second option was the Two Corps option, which was the penetration.

When Colin came over for his briefing he said "I would like to briefed again on the One Corps option".

And,I said "Fine, I'd like to show you the Two Corps option! So he came over, we briefed him on the One Corps option, we showed him the Two Corps option. Then the following morning he asked to be briefed again on the One Corps option.

I briefed him again on the One Corps option, and I pointed out all of my trepidations with regard to that option. And the conclusion of that, was Colin said "Okay, if you are going to be required to attack, you will have the forces that you need". That was very reassuring to me.

And he made that promise, and when I received the phone call eventually, I went back a few subsequent things came out you know, from again, the Washington community, that were really driving me up the wall. So I had composed a very very emotional message that I was going to send in just saying, you know, "This is ridiculous..." Because we were still being required to look at ridiculous options that were coming out and it seemed like everybody and his brother in Washington who had an idea of how we were going to do this, was coming up with... and then we were being asked to comment on it.

And so I just sent a message that said Look," you know, "My staff is being driven right into the ground by these `what if' drills? You're not showing us any confidence in us at all. We were the ones in the first place who said we didn't want to do this, and you forced us to brief you on this, and now we're being criticised for it. "But fortunately enough I never had to send that message, because I got the phonecall saying "Okay, you're gonna get the forces".

Q: Some have said that it was your opinion you could never get any strategic guidelines out of Washington....

Schwarzkopf: Whenthe Normandy Invasion was planned, a very specific strategic objective was given, and that strategic objective was the basis upon which the plan for the Normandy Invasion was derived.

We never had such a strategic directive. We had a series of phone calls... most of which were not followed up with hard copy... saying, "Do this, do that, what we think we ought to do is that, what we might want to do is that". and so there a came a point where, where all of us were saying, "Okay, it seems to me that all the decisions have been made. Let's have a strategic directive".

I think that more importantly people were saying "What, what will the end game be? You know, when do we terminate all this? What is it we're trying to accomplish at the end of the day? What do we expect to see on the ground? What are the terms of cessation of hostilities? Will we use nuclear weapons?"

You know, looking for some sort of an outline and form within which, you know, the military people could in fact make the decisions that the military people needed to make, once the political decisions had been made.

We never had that. And as a result, what we had to do, all of us, we had to make assumptions about the political decisions to therefore fit the military plans to what we assumed were the political conditions. And then of course, if one of those conditions changed it kind of threw everything into a cocked hat, and we had to go back to ground zero, not necessarily ...

Q: Everyone's always said to me "Oh, they had a very clear objective" you know, "Get rid of the Iraqis from Kuwait." Could you explain to me in headline terms, just very briefly, why wasn't that good enough?

Schwarzkopf: Well I think, I think... What has happened since then... is a pretty clear example of why that probably wasn't good enough.

I mean the whole question that we hear over and over again, "Why didn't you go to Baghdad and, and capture Saddam Hussein? Why didn't you inflict greater damage on the Republican Guard?" When the decision was made to end the war, the decision was made, it's because I had accomplished all of my military objectives. The things that now that people are talking about, capturing Saddam Hussein, destroying ... inflicting more damage on the Republican Guard, etc., etc., etc., these are political decisions, far beyond the military realm.

I had to establish my own objectives, and my own objectives frankly turned out to be, you know, number one objective: Iraqis out of Kuwait, number two: inflict as much damage as I could on their armed forces so they couldn't come back another day.

The kick them out of Iraq objective was one that was given to us by United Nations Resolution. But the second part of this thing; inflict maximum damage upon the Iraqi armed forces so that they cannot return, you know, shortly thereafter, was another objective that evolved. But again you'll never find that in writing, anywhere.