Hard Lessons

ell before dawn on March 20, 2003, Army and Marine Corps combat forces crossed into southern Iraq, launching the swiftest ground campaign in military history. Within three days, thousands of vehicles and hundreds of aircraft had pushed more than 200 miles into enemy territory. It was an unprecedented feat made possible by the actions of thousands of support troops-those who evacuate the wounded, keep the combat vehicles running and ferry ammunition.

At the tail end of the long support column came Pfc. Jessica Lynch's unit, the 507th Maintenance Company, whose deadly experience has reverberated through the Army, sending senior leaders scrambling to reorder priorities and revamp the service's training curriculum. Within three days of setting off from Kuwait, the 507th strayed off course on the battlefield, lost radio contact with other units and ran out of fuel. Finally, under deadly assault, most of the company's poorly maintained weapons malfunctioned. Inadequate training, insufficient equipment, exhaustion and human error all were blamed for a fiasco that left 11 soldiers dead and nine captured, including Lynch.

If the nation was shocked by what happened to the 507th, many Army officers were not. "The only thing that surprised me about what happened to the 507th was that it didn't happen to other units as well," says an Army planner at U.S. Central Command, the organization that led the war in Iraq. "The system sets these guys up for failure," he added. It is a harsh indictment, but one with which Army leaders seem to agree.

"Soldiers fight as they are trained to fight," the Army's 2003 report on the 507th notes. It may be the most telling line in the report, and explains why Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker, who was brought out of retirement by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld last summer, has initiated a training program aimed at instilling a "warrior ethos" among all troops-cooks and mechanics as well as tankers and infantrymen.

In "The Way Ahead," guidance to the troops published last November, Schoomaker wrote: "There can only be one standard of training for our soldiers, regardless of component or specialty." He tacitly acknowledged something everyone in the Army knows: Not all soldiers are treated equally. The combat troops in high-powered units get the newest equipment and are held to the highest standards of soldiering. The support units, those handling logistics and maintenance, for example, often are too busy keeping combat troops' equipment running and supplies flowing to master combat tactical skills. Changing that system will take much more than guidance from the chief of staff. "No support battalion commander was ever going to be relieved [of his duties] if he or she didn't conduct a training event. They would get relieved if they didn't provide adequate support to the combat commander," says the Army planner.

INSTITUTIONAL CHALLENGES

Grasping why the soldiers of the 507th didn't have the tools they needed requires an understanding of how the Army is structured and how it has evolved over the past two decades. The tactical Army is composed of three types of troops: combat (those whose primary job is to pull the trigger on a weapon, such as infantrymen and tankers); combat support (those whose specialties influence the battle, such as intelligence analysts, engineers, military police); and combat service support (those whose jobs are more administrative, such as logisticians, mechanics, supply clerks and cooks). All these roles are essential on the modern battlefield. But every organization has a hierarchy of clout. Not surprisingly, combat troops are at the top in the Army.

During the 1980s, as the Army budget ballooned with the Reagan administration's military buildup, the service bought more sophisticated equipment and trained harder and more frequently. For the combat troops it was a boom time. For the maintenance units and logisticians, it was a time of enormous change and challenges. The newer equipment was harder to maintain, and as units trained more often, equipment broke down more frequently. Many support units were so busy trying to keep combat units running that they neglected training in tactical skills. In the early 1990s, tight budgets forced the Army to make deep cuts in personnel. To maintain combat strength, the Army made those cuts somewhat disproportionately from already-lean support units.

The Army's report on the misfortunes and miscalculations of the 507th provides a cautionary tale for combat commanders and their supporting units in contemporary warfare.

The 82 soldiers of the 507th arrived in Kuwait late last February from Fort Bliss, Texas, a desert post on the U.S.-Mexican border and home to the Army's Air Defense Artillery Center. Between their arrival in Kuwait and the assault into Iraq, they prepared for their mission, which was foremost to maintain the vehicles and equipment of a Patriot missile battery, the 5th Battalion, 52nd Air Defense Artillery.

At 2 p.m. on March 20, hours after the Patriot battery crossed into Iraq, 507th company commander Capt. Troy King led 64 of his soldiers in 33 vehicles from a staging area in Kuwait to a new staging area on the Iraqi border for the advance north. King carried a CD-ROM containing his orders, route information and annotated large-scale maps. He also had a commercial global positioning system receiver. His orders were to follow behind the 3rd Infantry Division's 3rd Forward Support Battalion, the unit to which he reported, through several staging areas to a destination 350 kilometers northwest. The support convoy was to take Highway 8 north, then take Highway 1 west on a dogleg around the city of An Nasiriyah, before returning to Highway 8 and continuing the trip north. King believed, erroneously, that he was to stay on Highway 8 for the entire trip.

It took seven hours for the 507th to reach the rendezvous point on the Iraqi border. They arrived at 9 p.m., exhausted after traveling off-road over desert terrain. The soldiers refueled and serviced their vehicles, ate and tried to get some sleep before pushing on early the next morning. It would be days before many of them would get another chance to rest. They left at 7 a.m. on March 21, and around noon, arrived at the second staging area; a few short hours later they were on the move again toward a third staging area 80 kilometers northwest. It was hard going. Some of the heaviest vehicles got stuck in the soft sand. Others broke down. Drivers grew confused in the darkness and lost track of the column.

King decided to break the convoy into two groups. He put his talented first sergeant, Robert Dowdy, in charge of the vehicles that were stuck or stalled, along with those that could tow or pull them free. King then moved ahead with the vehicles that could keep pace with the 3rd Forward Support Battalion. King's group arrived at the next staging area, a position called Lizard, at 5:30 a.m. on March 22, and he reported the situation to his battalion commander. Meanwhile, Dowdy worked through the night to recover and repair the disabled vehicles. The main support convoy departed Lizard early that afternoon, along with the members of the 507th led there by King, but King remained behind to wait for Dowdy.

Dowdy arrived at Lizard later that afternoon. By early evening, King had organized the vehicles into a column. He distributed the unit's remaining five radios, six GPS receivers and single .50-caliber machine gun among the 18-vehicle convoy (two of the vehicles were being towed) and the rest of the 507th moved out. There were 33 soldiers in all, including two from the 3rd Forward Support Battalion who, with their 10-ton wrecker, earlier had become separated from the battalion after helping to rescue some of the 507th's vehicles.

King had no way to communicate with the 3rd Forward Support Battalion, now far ahead of him, and he was anxious to catch up. He decided to take a shortcut to Highway 8. That turned out to be a bad idea. The terrain was rough and vehicles again became bogged down. It took five hours to make the 18-kilometer journey to Highway 8. By then, nearly two days had passed since anyone in the group had slept.

WRONG TURNS

When the convoy finally reached the intersection of Highway 8 and Highway 1, King mistakenly believed he was to stay on Highway 8. By 5:30 a.m. on March 23, he was on the outskirts of An Nasiriyah. Although Highway 8 actually veers to the west of the city, requiring a left turn, King, who was relying on his GPS receiver for directions, missed the turn and continued north across the Euphrates River and into the city. By then, the convoy had been traveling so long that most of its radio batteries were dead.

Some soldiers worried when they saw armed Iraqis at checkpoints around the city, but the Iraqis waved at the troops. Other Iraqis, manning machine guns mounted on trucks, drove past the convoy. The Iraqis were troubling, but the soldiers carried orders forbidding them from using their weapons unless they were fired upon first. Also, they had been told in briefings that just because Iraqis carried weapons it didn't mean they were hostile.

An Nasiriyah is a maze of low-rise buildings, narrow streets and alleys. The city is built on partially drained marshland, flanked in the south by the Euphrates and in the north by a series of man-made canals. The roadsides along the route King took are full of soft sand and mud, a perfect trap for heavy vehicles. King soon realized he was lost. He ordered the convoy turned around so he could retrace his steps, but the 10-ton wrecker ran out of fuel as it was making the turn. The only fuel truck was by then empty, so King ordered the soldiers to refuel the wrecker using their five-gallon fuel cans. King then led the convoy south back through the city and into one of the deadliest attacks encountered by any troops in the war. As Iraqis began firing on the convoy, 1st Sgt. Dowdy, who was at the rear of the convoy, radioed King and told him the convoy needed to move faster. King sped up, but then missed his turn. By the time another soldier caught up with him to tell him, all the drivers had missed the turn as well.

The convoy attempted to turn around again, a difficult prospect while under fire in the narrow streets. The 10-ton wrecker got stuck in the soft sand, and in a dramatic rescue, Dowdy freed the two soldiers in the truck and put them in his own Humvee. But soon, the Humvee was hit by fire and crashed into a tractor-trailer in the convoy. Dowdy was killed on impact. The others in the Humvee were seriously injured, some fatally; those who survived were captured, including Lynch. King regained the lead of the convoy, which by then had disintegrated into three small groups under heavy fire. Soldiers fired back, but most of their weapons jammed, due to lack of disciplined maintenance in desert conditions.

By all accounts, the soldiers fought bravely. Some were remarkably skillful. Pfc. Patrick Miller, a 23-year-old welder from Kansas, "single-handedly took on several Iraqis, manually slamming rounds into his assault rifle and firing as they prepared to lob mortar rounds at Lynch and other soldiers from the 507th," according to the Baltimore Sun. He was captured with eight others and was the only soldier in the unit to receive a Silver Star, one of the military's highest awards for valor.

King, his driver and soldiers in two other vehicles ultimately made their way out of the city and encountered a Marine Corps combat unit, which immediately sent troops north to rescue the remaining members of the 507th. It took the Marines another eight days to get the city under control.

Of the 33 soldiers that entered An Nasiriyah with the 507th, 11 were killed in combat and nine were taken prisoner. Of the 22 survivors, nine were wounded in action.

EVERY SOLDIER A WARRIOR

The Army's report on the 507th is troubling reading for any soldier. The fact that so many of the 507th's weapons malfunctioned is deeply disturbing to many. It might not be surprising to a layman that most soldiers in the 507th apparently hadn't spent enough time cleaning their weapons-the reason the weapons malfunctioned. After all, the soldiers were traveling for days with little rest and under harsh environmental conditions. To an infantryman or any other combat soldier, however, the care of his weapon is a point of pride and takes priority over virtually everything else. Even the most reliable rifles and machine guns must be disassembled, cleaned and oiled regularly. In Iraq, where sand the consistency of talcum powder permeates everything, soldiers need to clean their weapons more than once a day. Such knowledge is drilled into infantrymen until it becomes second nature.

Instilling such knowledge in all soldiers, no matter their specialty, is the new Army chief's goal. Retired Lt. Gen. Theodore Stroup, formerly the Army's top personnel officer, has much praise for Schoomaker's plan. "He has turned around the money flow, and we're going to put more money immediately into fixing some of these individual soldier [shortcomings]," Stroup says. "[Schoomaker] wants to make sure everybody can defend themselves and can react-which is different from defending-to certain battlefield tactical situations that arise from small units moving together."

Schoomaker also is emphasizing the importance of fully equipping every soldier who goes to war with the best body armor, weapons and communications equipment. In the past, the emphasis has been on outfitting units sent first to the fight or closest to the front lines. But operations in Iraq, where U.S. forces confront insurgents instead of a conventional military force, have rendered such distinctions far less relevant than in the past.

Now, all units deploying to Iraq, active and reserve, combat and support, are getting additional training in tactical skills. In addition, the Army has hired the Alexandria, Va.-based contractor Military Professional Resources Inc. to conduct realistic training in Kuwait for troops already in the region or just arriving. MPRI, which employs retired military personnel, is preparing soldiers for ambushes like the one that derailed the 507th.

Stroup says that living up to Schoomaker's training goals will require a cultural change on the part of the Army. It's a brutally demanding job for units that often are too small and under-equipped. Stroup says there's rarely enough time in the day for most units to accomplish their objectives. So how will a combat commander react in the future when his maintenance company commander tells him the unit's tanks or artillery won't be repaired on schedule because the maintenance unit has to do tactical combat training? "That's to be determined," says Stroup.