Colonel Chuck Thomas, our principal advisor on the current intelligence situation, had been my senior intelligence staff officer when I'd commanded the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division, and I knew him to be a brilliant, dedicated professional. Every evening he would brief me on the intelligence community's latest bomb damage assessment and have to listen to me make facetious remarks like: "Well, if we knocked out one span of a four-span bridge so that anything that tried to cross it fell into the Euphrates, you intelligence guys would tell me the bridge was only twenty-five percent damaged."
As we shifted our bombing from strategic targets to the Iraqi forces, these headaches were becoming worse. It was a lot easier to tell whether we'd knocked out a munitions factory or biological weapons site than a battalion of forty tanks dug into the desert, and the Republican Guard had literally gone underground: they'd built bunkers for both their men and their tanks. So even though we were hitting them with as many as thirty B-52 sorties every day, it was hard to quantify the results. To solve the problem, we invented a tactic we called "tank plinking": we sent individual airplanes to spot individual bunkers and demolish them with laser-guided bombs. Pilots would return reporting direct hits. Even so, not much damage was visible aboveground, and the analysts stubbornly maintained that the Republican Guard units were still close to one hundred percent. It didn't take long for our disputes to become headline news. One story in The New York Times (datelined Washington) carried the headline "Best Iraqi Troops Not Badly Hurt by Bombs, Pentagon Officials Say," while another (datelined Dhahran) averred: "Elite Iraqi Forces Hurt by Bombings, Allied Aides Insist."
It Doesn't Take a Hero : The Autobiography of General H. Norman Schwarzkopf. Linda Grey Bantam books 1992. P.431
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2025-06-26 04:15 pm (UTC)Colonel Chuck Thomas, our principal advisor on the current intelligence situation, had been my senior intelligence staff officer when I'd commanded the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division, and I knew him to be a brilliant, dedicated professional. Every evening he would brief me on the intelligence community's latest bomb damage assessment and have to listen to me make facetious remarks like: "Well, if we knocked out one span of a four-span bridge so that anything that tried to cross it fell into the Euphrates, you intelligence guys would tell me the bridge was only twenty-five percent damaged."
As we shifted our bombing from strategic targets to the Iraqi forces, these headaches were becoming worse. It was a lot easier to tell whether we'd knocked out a munitions factory or biological weapons site than a battalion of forty tanks dug into the desert, and the Republican Guard had literally gone underground: they'd built bunkers for both their men and their tanks. So even though we were hitting them with as many as thirty B-52 sorties every day, it was hard to quantify the results. To solve the problem, we invented a tactic we called "tank plinking": we sent individual airplanes to spot individual bunkers and demolish them with laser-guided bombs. Pilots would return reporting direct hits. Even so, not much damage was visible aboveground, and the analysts stubbornly maintained that the Republican Guard units were still close to one hundred percent. It didn't take long for our disputes to become headline news. One story in The New York Times (datelined Washington) carried the headline "Best Iraqi Troops Not Badly Hurt by Bombs, Pentagon Officials Say," while another (datelined Dhahran) averred: "Elite Iraqi Forces Hurt by Bombings, Allied Aides Insist."
It Doesn't Take a Hero : The Autobiography of General H. Norman Schwarzkopf. Linda Grey Bantam books 1992. P.431
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Date: 2025-06-26 04:28 pm (UTC)