Robert H. Scales

Billed as the official U.S. Army history of Operations Desert Shield/Desert Storm, this 1993 volume was assembled by a team of soldiers and Army civilians originally under the auspices of the Office of the Chief of Staff of the Army. My volume, endorsed by the Association of the United States Army, was published in 1994 by Brassey's in a slightly different form.

General Scales and his team presents the reader with seven chapters, an epilogue, a chronology, a limited bibliography, a useful glossary, and an index. Chapter 1 recounts the recovery of the U.S. Army after the debacle of Vietnam. Chapter 2 describes the Army's initial response to Iraq's August 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Chapter 3 goes into the Army's planning effort for the war's ground phase, while Chapter 4 describes U.S. Army Central Command's (ARCENT) activities once the war began in earnest on January 17, 1991. Chapter 5 is all about the ground war. Chapter 6 covers ARCENT's activities from the February 28 cease fire through the redeployment of VII and XVIII Airborne Corps in the summer of 1991. The final chapter is a wrap up--lessons learned along with predictions for the future of the U.S. Army.

This is an institutional history, with all of the pluses and minuses that go with it. On the up side, there is no question that the Scales team had ready access to the information necessary to produce a first-class history of the war. The writing style is impressive, as scales ensured that this is a story about the new all-volunteer Army, a phoenix risen from the ashes of the Army of Vietnam. So there are a few vignettes about individual soldiers at war, usually at the beginning of a chapter. This book is a very readable account.

On the down side, this book is not a straight retelling of the events of the Persian Gulf War. It is quite evident that Scales and his team took great pains to avoid criticizing anyone in a campaign that in 1993 was perceived to be perfect, but in reality had significant flaws. As this book appeared a mere two years after the war, the celebrity status of CINC Central Command General H. Norman Schwarzkopf protected him from any criticism, although Scales did manage to mention some of Schwarzkopf's negative personality traits. There is some implied ARCENT unhappiness with the way the Desert Storm air campaign, but there is no open critique of CENTAF or how the theater commander failed to press his air commander to support ARCENT adequately. None of the CINC's unhappiness with ARCENT or VII Corps performance during the ground war appears in these pages. The Scales team even fails to mention that ARCENT himself, Lieutenant General John Yeosock, had to be medevaced back to Germany mere days prior to the start of the ground war, nor does the team address the impact of the return of General Yeosock to ARCENT on the eve of the ground war on the performance of his two corps, his headquarters location choice, and his relationship with CINCCENT.

One other complaint is specific to the Brassey's print of this book, and that is the quality of the charts and photos. The original publication released by the Army was printed in color, which suited the photos and the Power Point style charts and maps just fine. However, Brassey's illustrated its volume in grayscale, presumedly to reduce costs. That decision made the charts harder to read and understand.

Overall this is a decent history with a good story to tell. Howerver, internal Army politics prevented this book from being a definitive history, something an institutional history should strive to become.… (meer)

MG Scales is one of the great military thinkers of the modern age, and this book reflects the vast effort of thought he has put into military problems during his career. His thesis, that in limited-objectives warfare, technology enabled firepower is the key way to destroy the enemy, and that close-combat maneuver forces are for 'findin' em and fixin' em.' To some degree, I agree with his thesis, but note that my personal experiences in Iraq taught me that A) clese combat with the insurgents is the most efficient way to inflict mass casualties on the insurgents; B) the insurgent's capability of hiding themselves in the populace prevents the use of massed fires and target detection, not to mention the politically unpalatable possibility of collateral casualties. As usual, MG Scales writes well, and thoroughly understands his subject.… (meer)