Trainor: The Iraqis had built up a significant number of forces in Kuwait. And when Colin Powell looked at the order of battle of the Iraqis, we had only one corps in the region. And if he was going to have the sort of decisive rapid victory that he thought we should have under the so-called Powell doctrine, you've got to have the overwhelming force. So his idea was we'll build up our forces until we absolutely overwhelm the Iraqis not only in numbers but also in fire power. So he supported the idea of a build-up of two corps. One that was already in the region, that was brought in the period of August and September. And then bring a corps down from our NATO forces in Europe to double. And these were a very heavy forces with lots of armor.

Q: In hindsight was it a bit of overkill?

Trainor: Schwarzkopf, of course, was delighted that Powell was going to bring in more forces. Every general always wants more forces, more equipment, more ammunition. Their appetite is insatiable. So Schwarzkopf and Powell were in perfect harmony that we needed more forces down there. I think in retrospect, we certainly had more forces than were needed, both in terms of the Iraqis and their absolute combat power, but also the relative combat power that we brought to the field. There was more than enough to do the job.

Q: A capsule sketch of Schwarzkopf.....

Trainor: Norman Schwarzkopf is a very complex man, big, and bluff, with a terrible temper, but as I say with a heart of gold. He really was soft inside. He had a very successful Army career. He had touched all the bases, had the right sort of jobs and commands. But he never was what I would describe as vintage stock. He was a good man and he was a very competent person. One of his great features was that he was good friends with the then Chief of Staff of the Army, Carl Bruno. And when the opening came down at the Central Command, which had the geographic responsibility for American military activities in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, nobody objected to Schwarzkopf getting the job, because in large measure there was the thinking at the end of the Cold War, that command may go away anyway. So in a sense Schwarzkopf was given an award for long and faithful service and kind of put out to pasture. And as a matter of fact, a lot of the officers that were down there were people who were just getting ready for retirement. And it was kind of considered a backwater. It was a headquarters and that was all. It had no troops assigned. The major theater commanders were the theater commander in Europe, who was the NATO commander, and in the Pacific. They had all the forces. And so Schwarzkopf simply had a headquarters, and if a crisis developed in the Persian Gulf he would have to borrow forces from the Pacific Command and the European Command with the approval obviously of the Secretary of Defense to fight his war. So it was a command without a command, and nobody paid that much attention to it. So Norman Schwarzkopf got down there, and being a good soldiers he started to plan for possible contingencies in the Persian Gulf including one against Iraq.

Q: What about his temper and its affect on his subordinates?

Trainor: Norman Schwarzkopf was a big man and he had a very short fuse. His temper was absolutely without bounds. He would just go purple in the face and scream and yell at people, and he simply intimidated all of those around him. This of course had a terrible effect on his staff who were, with very few exceptions willing to challenge him. Now there were people that were willing to challenge him and Schwarzkopf really, oncehe blew his stack and he settled down again he was a very reasonable sort of man. And his temper was in the form of these outbursts, but he actually underneath was pretty soft. He had opportunities there and reason during the course of the crisis of the war to relieve a lot of his subordinates, both commanders and staff officers, but he never had the heart to do it. He would scream and yell at them but he'd never replace them.

Now some of the members of his staff knew how to work around this and paid no attention to his outbursts. But for most of the officers that served under him, it was a frightening thing to have this man of such large size and power just exploding all over you. And he did intimidate many of his subordinates, and most of them considered him to be a tyrant and a bully.

Q: What was the vulnerability of that first deployment?

Trainor: When the Iraqis crossed into Kuwait we were very ill-prepared to deal with it. After all he had all of these divisions that were within marching distance of the eastern provinces of Saudi Arabia if they cared to continue on. We had not taken deterrent action ahead of time to preposition forces out there that might act as a bulwark against invasion. Or as a source of resources if the invasion did take place. So we had to start from scratch. Now Schwarzkopf did have a contingency plan to move into Saudi Arabia, to defend Saudi Arabia against Iraqi aggression, but that's all it was. He didn't have the forces. So the Joint Chiefs of Staff had to assign him the forces. You had to get the airplanes and the ships to move people out there, and it was a very dicey situation, because nobody knew whether Saddam Hussein was going to be satisfied with swallowing up Kuwait or whether they wanted to continue on into Saudi Arabia. So Schwarzkopf took a gamble. There was a regular deployment plan to get forces out into the region, a very orderly process. But most of it was support equipment in anticipation of warning time before any trouble in the region. But now he didn't have warning time, he had to face the actual fact that the Iraqis were in Kuwait and threatening Saudi Arabia. So he took the position that he would upset the time table for deployment to get troops out there. And he saw American television as a means of signalling to Saddam Hussein the tremendous buildup of American forces. So in a sense he exploited the television business.

Because they focused on airplane after airplane landing in Riyadh, and Dharan and Jubail and places like that, and all of these soldiers getting off like they're ready to go into combat right away. Well, there were soldiers landingm but they didn't have very much in the way of equipment or in the way of ammunition. Indeed they didn't even have enough in the way of food and they were going to these fast food places in Riyadh to feed the troops. But the image that was projected was of enormous American power coming in on the ground. This was during that first and second week of August. But it was all a charade. There was nothing. If the Iraqis had come south at that point they would have been bloody but they would have been successful probably in taking the eastern provinces. It wasn't until the latter part of August and into September that we got the heavy forces in there and the aircraft that were in there that could have stopped them. But those early days, they were a cliff-hanger for Schwarzkopf and Colin Powell and the Administration in general. But the American public and most of all Saddam Hussein didn't see it that way. By looking at the television they saw this terrific build-up of American forces being done very, very quickly.

Q: There's a bit of finessing going on about the role of Israel, what is it?

Trainor: The President had expended a lot of tickets to put together the international coalition. And a large part of that coalition was the Arab coalition. And this was very, very important for the conduct of any sort of anti-Iraqi action that he was going to take. The basic fly that could get in that ointment was Israel. Because if Israel got in the war, which is something that Saddam Hussein was trying to get them to do, the danger of the Arab coalition breaking up, would have been catastrophic to the administration's policy for ejecting Iraq from Kuwait, because it was supposed to be us in support of the Arabs.

Q: So what does the President have to do?

Trainor: The President to deal with this problem played it very, very low key. He virtually ignored Israel. But in the meantime, people like Lawrence Eaglebeurger, were going out and dealing with the Israelis and convincing the Israelis to play a low key action. Not to come up on the television or the radio, keep it very quiet. So in a sense the Administration played a game of focusing attention on the Arab world and in large measure ignoring the Israeli part of the dimension in the hope that it would not get anybody's attention. And he was very successful in it.

The Administration told the Israelis you know, that we are serious about this, we're going to put forces in there. And that these forces would be sufficient not only to eject Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, but look to the interest of all the major players in the region which would include Israel. And that the Israelis understanding the problem of coalition solidarity and the fact that by getting too close to the Americans in this instance that that could work adversely agains the coalition, they agreed to play it low key. But they made it very clear to the President that Israel would look to Israel's own interests, and if the situation threatened Israel, Israel would take independent action. The thing came to a head when the Iraqis started to fire SCUDs into Tel Aviv. That's when the test of this arrangement was brought on the table.

Q: What's the problem with the guidance system of the Tomahawks?

Trainor: The Tomahawk missile was a cruise missile. And it was designed to follow specific terrain features. With using satellite photography we would get the picture of the ground and this would be digitized in a form that could go into a computer that would be in the Tomahawk missile, so that when the Tomahawk was fired it simply would match what was in its program with the terrain features on the ground and follow it like a roadmap to its target. Now the problem in the Gulf War was that the desert region over in Kuwait and in Iraq was so flat that there were very few signposts. So what the Navy did was make use of the programming that went over Iran, where there were mountains, the Zagros Mountains, which gave a very clear identifying signal. And they had programmed the missiles over the Zagros Mountains long before the Iraqi crisis. This was the route that the Tomahawk missiles were going to take when they went into the Soviet Union if there had been a war with the Soviet Union. So they simply took that and modified it so that when the missiles were halfway up the Zagros Mountains on the course to the Soviet Union they'd make a left turn and go the east towards Baghdad. So in that sense all they had to digitize was the space between where the left turn took place and Baghdad. And that's what they did and that's the way the missiles were fired.

Q: What was the diplomatic delicacy of sending missiles over Iran?

Trainor: Needless to say, there was a risk in firing the Tomahawk missiles over Iranian territory until they made their left hand turn. But it a risk that they thought was worth taking. They weren't at all sure that the Iranians would even spot the missiles. If they did there was a very small likelihood that they would be able to shoot them down. And thirdly they felt that there was a very small likelihood of the Iranians complaining about it for two reasons. Number one, the missiles were aiming at their hated enemy Iraq, so that couldn't displease them. Secondly, they didn't want to admit their inability to prevent these missiles from going over their own territory. So it was a pretty good bet and the Iranians never said a word about the missiles although we know that they knew that the missiles were going over their territory.

Q: The Stealth fighter--what's the difference between its image and the reality?

Trainor: The Stealth fighter was supposed to be the greatest advance in military operations .....Stealth....it conjured up the vision of something invisible. Well, the airplanes were not invisible. They just had a very, very low radar profile. Certain radars could pick them up, but most radars in the course of normal activities would not be able to pick up the Stealth because of its unique radar-avoiding characteristics. So the decision was made that in areas where there was a very high air defense capability on the part of the Iraqis that we would use the Stealth airplanes to go in to take out those capabilities, to go after the Iraqi early warning system and air defense system around Baghdad. Thereafter you could use more conventional non-Stealth aircraft. So the Stealth was going to go in. However, even the pilots of the Stealth airplanes were very, very nervous about this. They weren't quite as sure that they were as stealthy as the advertisements made them out to be. So when they went on their first strike in the Baghdad region there were also conventional airplanes, EF-111's which were electronic jamming aircraft went on the flanks to suppress the Iraqi radar. But the Stealth did work reasonably well. And the only airplanes that actually did fly over Baghdad were the Stealth aircraft. They were able to take out the Iraqi command and control for their air defense missiles, and thereafter the bombings could take place in and around Baghdad with relative impunity. And the proof of the pudding is that no airplanes were shot down in the bombing raids in and around Baghdad.

Q: The one corps plan, at the first briefing presented in Washington, what's Powell up to?

Trainor: Washington became a little antsy about what Schwarzkopf was going to do in terms of offensive operations. Schwarzkopf had only one corps in the region. The Iraqis had built up quite a few forces, and Schwarzkopf felt that he didn't have enough forces. And the only plan he came up with which was considered in Washington both by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and by the Administration as unimaginative, which was to go right up the middle. But the Administration wanted a briefing on his plan, so he sent a team over with this one corps plan which was right up the middle. And it was not very well received. Schwarzkopf had put a lot of caveats on the briefing of this plan, saying that this was what he would have to do if he only had one corps. But he never gave an alternative of what he would do with two corps. And this is really what hurt him. Now Powell was in the position of giving his advice to the President. And you had two elements involved in this thing. One was the ground plan, which was what Secretary of Defense Cheney described as hi diddle diddle right up the middle, kind of catastrophic plan right into the teeth of the Iraqi defenses.

But then there was the air plan. And the aviators had developed this air plan, which they were convinced that if it was executed, it was going to win the war. Now Powell was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but he was also an army officer. And he was afraid that the comparison of the two plans, the Administration was apt to opt for an air plan as the solution to the war, where Powell was convinced that you needed both ground action and air action. So he had to kind of finesse the briefing and to convince the President that this very exuberant air plan that he was hearing about could not do the job by itself, and that there had to be a ground action. But in keeping with his idea of using overwhelming force, the force had to be double in the region. And he was very effective in doing that. He was able to convince the President that an air war would not do it, and you didn't want to launch it prematurely. We should wait until we had an overwhelming ground and air power in position before we went into action.

So when the plan was presented by Schwarzkopf's briefers in Washington which was a single corps attack, basically right into the teeth of the Iraqi defenses, he said that won't do, that we need more forces. And in a sense, he was also looking to slow down the desire to go on the offensive. And I think in the back of his mind he still was thinking that if we give sanctions a chance here we may not have to use these forces. Or if we position these forces, the Iraqis may come to their senses and come to some sort of negotiated solution. So I think Powell was reluctant to see us actually get into active warfare. And he was hoping to slow down this move towards war. But convincethat if we were going to go to war then we better do it with the overwhelming force that he felt was necessary to win very quickly and with few casualties.

Q: Tell me about the fallout after that briefing. Cheney starts going off on his own...what does it drive Cheney to do.

Trainor: Dick Cheney, the Secretary of Defense was a very important figure in all of these events that eventually led up to Desert Storm. First of all, he was aware that Powell wanted to give sanctions a chance, whereas Cheney was a hawk--we had to get these guys out of there, we had to use force to do it. So when he started to see these plans come in from Schwarzkopf which were unimaginative and he was getting briefings from the Joint Staff on all of the problems that they had, he came to the conclusion that the military was dragging their feet. He wanted to energize them. So in effect, he went outside the system and used people on his personal staff to come up with another option to the sort of stuff that he was getting from Schwartzkopf and from the Joint Staff. And this upset Powell,. He felt that the Secretary of Defense was getting into purely military business. Needless to say, it was upsetting Schwarzkopf.

However, it was the right of the Secretary of Defense, to do this. And he got the results that he was looking for. He got the Joint Chiefs of Staff and he got, most of all, Schwarzkopf to start to be a little more creative in their thinking, because Cheney had come up with a plan which called for wide excursion into the western desert, which would divert Baghdad's attention from the Kuwaiti area, and also it would protect Israel. So it not only fulfilled not only a military requirement but a political requirement. Well, the military thought that was crazy, going way out in the desert, but it got their attention. So little by little, the plan which was originally hi diddle diddle, right up the middle, suddenly became a plan going farther and farther to the west, which ultimately became what Schwarzkopf called his Hail Mary or the Western Excursion as it was known in the Pentagon, and it turned out to be a pretty good strategy.