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17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
No thanks to Schwarzkopf, August 29, 2002
This book describes General Fred Franks' life and especially his experiences during Desert Storm, the war in 1991 in the Persian Gulf to kick Iraq out of Kuwait.
To really like this book you need to be a bit of a military fanatic. Fred Franks repeats so many times how wonderful it is to be a soldier, and how great the "warrior ethos" is, that you realize that for him the military is practically a religion.
The thing in this book that I found the most interesting are the descriptions of the magnitude of military might that was fielded during Desert Storm.
The American Army VII Corps (commanded by Gen. Franks) included 146,000 soldiers, 50,000 vehicles (incl. 1,600 tanks) and 800 helicopters. Not only are these numbers huge, but the logistics involved are mind-boggling: the soldiers need food and water, and the vehicles and aircraft burned an incredible 3.2 million gallons of fuel each day. When fighting the VII Corps expended 2,500 tons of ammunition every day.
And VII Corps was only part of the military forces involved. There was another Army corps, there were Marine units, there was the Air Force and the Navy, and forces from quite a few other countries. An amazing marshalling of military forces, and all under the command of General Stormin' Norman Schwarzkopf (more about him later).
I found the book interesting, but it does have a lot of problems. It's way too long, mostly due to repetitiveness. With some editing it could have been cut down by at least 30% with no loss of information.
Another problem is that there are no useful maps. There are a lot of small maps, about 1/3 of a page each, but they simply don't show enough detail. Again and again you find the text referring to some town or road or river and they simply aren't on the maps.
Another major problem is the lack of a glossary with definitions for all the military acronyms and abbreviations that are used.
And then we have General Schwarzkopf, who is NOT thanked in the acknowledgements. Gen. Franks is very careful to thank everyone from his parents to his family to all of his subordinates, and then goes on to thank Colin Powell (then Chairman for the Joint Chiefs of Staff), Dick Cheney (then Sec. of Defense) and President George Bush Sr. But not Gen. Schwarzkopf.
It turns out that Gen. Schwarzkopf wrote an autobiography, "It Doesn't Take a Hero", and in that book he criticized Gen. Franks for the way he commanded VII Corps during Desert Storm.
Gen. Franks uses this book to return the favor. I won't go into extensive details (and Gen. Franks keeps his criticism fairly low-key), but Franks basically claims that Schwarzkopf liked having his butt kissed by his subordinates, was prone to throwing temper tantrums, wasn't competent to understand or command armored (tank) operations and made several tactical errors. In particular, not giving VII Corps more operational room to the north, not using the Air Force to prevent the Iraqi Republican Guards from escaping northwards and declaring "victory" a couple of days prematurely were big mistakes. The result was that Washington decreed a ceasefire and a large portion of the Republican Guards avoided destruction.
I actually found this dispute between Franks and Schwarzkopf to be quite interesting, and it's so very human to want to get back at someone who's done you dirt. So whether Franks or Schwarzkopf is right, the dispute does add flavor to Franks' story.
Rennie Petersen
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great book. A must for students and researchers., September 9, 1999
I have researched the Gulf War for several years and found this book to be one of the best to give an inside look into the corps command level. Clancy and Frank's book shows the campaign through the eyes of the VII Corps commander, which was in charge of the main effort during the Iraqi campaign. It contains facts and details that are unavailable elsewhere (at least not in non military sources). This book, together with Schwartzkopf's "It Doesn't Take a Hero", Atkinson's "Crusade" and Gordon's "The Generals'War", is a must for every Gulf War researcher.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Fascinating as biography, flawed as history, March 19, 2002
By A Customer
Since this is one of the relatively few popularly-available, yet widely-distributed, histories of the Gulf War published to date, I approached this with certain mixed feelings. Tom Clancy's involvement was a plus and a minus - he is a moderatly capable writer (though his ability to craft character, vs. technology, is sub-optimal), but he has become something of a military-industrial complex on a small scale in and of himself, the McDonalds franchise of military fiction. Fred Franks was, at the time I bought the book, somewhat less well-known, but as a corps commander in an operation I wanted to understand much better than existing published material would allow, he was a more credible source. What results from this mix is an unexpected melange - mostly for the better (relative to, say, Clancy's take on potential Russian/Chinese conflict, which was abysmal), but with certain flaws. Franks certainly has the expertise, credibility, and transferable wisdom to lend some real substance to Clancy's usual wanna-be star-stricken jingoism. The background on Franks' experience as a junior, and then senior, officer in the Army during and after Vietnam also help provide valuable context to close the vast conceptual gulf between 1973 and 1991, socially, personally, and militarily. What is lacking is a coherent, detailed story of the overall Desert Storm (versus VII Corps-perceived) operation itself - a story that is implied, if not promised, by the book's title and stated premise. At times, the narrative loses focus and does not follow the overall action closely enough; at other times, it dives into tantalizing description of individual unit actions that are not fully placed in context or followed up; or divergences into Franks' personal thoughts and schedule, which (though interesting on the level of understanding the blow-by-blow experience of a large-unit commander) do not add much to the overall clarity of the action. Some points of leadership philosophy become repetitive - nor is it clear where the boundary between Franks' (Clancy's?) specific beliefs diverge from some assertion of universal concepts. At times, the narrative becomes a thinly-veiled personal defense against higher-level criticism of Franks' asserted failings in pursuing the Iraqis in the early stages of the ground action. Given the overwhelming victory achieved and the extremely lopsided casualty ratio, this seems unnecessary - since the internal discussion among theater- and corps-level command in the operation has been largely invisible to the public, it is difficult to assess to what extent the implicit back-and-forth indicated in this book is valid, but the results speak for themselves. Whether the Iraqi Army could have been defeated 207-0, instead of 200-0, seems irrelevant compared to the larger strategic question (still alive today) of whether or not Coalition forces should have gone after Saddam Hussein's regime at its root - a question that was answered at a much higher level than any to which Franks had access. As it is, the nitpicking and (apparently bitter) counter-criticisms that sortof-kindof surface in the book between Franks' VII Corps and CENTCOM (Schwartzkopf) appear to be more a reflection of the power ploys within US command structures than anything that will (ultimately) have any real meaning to anyone but the immediate participants. In real terms, they seem to have relevance primarily to the pros and cons of different styles of leadership and command, rather than to any real possibilities for different outcomes for Desert Storm - given the constraints operating at national command (rather than tactical or even theater) levels. Ultimately, this is an interesting primer in tactics for (patient and committed) lay readers, and a solid contribution to a future body of first-person perspectives on a critical event in late-20th-century history. However, it is neither objective enough, comprehensive enough, sufficiently researched, nor inclusive enough of Iraqi (or non-US Coalition) perspectives to constitute a major historical contribution to our understanding of this particular conflict.
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