like chum, small pieces of fish scattered on the water to attract the big ones. In intelligence, you often had
to chum far and wide. It was one more thing the president and Tenet bonded over. Bush, one of the biggest
olitical fun
-raisers of all time, and Tenet, the U.S. government covert-money man, knew the restorative
ower of money. So he was asking a lot and offering a lot. Just wait, he told the Kurdish leaders,
it
was
coming—the military, the CIA and money.
ON MARCH
29, General Franks marched into hostile territory—the Tank, the secure meeting space of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, the heads of each of the four services. In many respects the Joint Chiefs are an anachronism.
Under Title X of the U.S. Code, which deals with the military, the four heads—the chief of staff of the Army,
the chief of naval operations, the chief of staff of the Air Force, and the commandant of the Marine Corps—
have the responsibility to recruit, train and equip their own services. But the chiefs command no forces in
combat. The forces are assigned to combatant commanders such as Franks himself.
Since Franks reported directly to the secretary of defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was not
his boss, and the service chiefs were damn sure not his bosses—though by technical measurements of seniority
they all outranked him. In fact, Franks just about considered himself out of the Army. He was a joint war
fighter. “I am absolutely purple,” he once said, purple being the color that would emerge if you put a uniform
from each service in a blender.
The tension between Franks and the chiefs was palpable. The previous year, during the height of the
Afghanistan campaign, the chiefs, as is their tendency, were pushing for more of their own in the war—the
avy for one more aircraft carrier, the Army another brigade, and the Air Force another squadron.
Franks one day blew up half jokingly at the chiefs, “You Title X motherfuckers! Let me tell you
something. At the end of the day, combatants, and that’s either me or the boss I work for [Rumsfeld], are going
to put together a joint and combined operation here and it is not going to scratch the itch of any one of the
services.”
Several of the chiefs remember Franks’s outburst as less confrontational and more in a humorous vein,
though they vividly remember being called “Title X motherfuckers.”
So now Franks had to update them on his Iraq planning. It was a long briefing with 70-plus slides. He
tried to present it mostly as a concept of operations, the latest on the Generated Start—probably 180,000 to
200,000 troops or half of Desert Storm.
Franks said he had six months to be ready to execute by October 1 if the president demanded it. But no
sooner than October 1.
One of the chiefs thought it was hard to tell how serious this discussion was. Part of it seemed like a drill
to scare Saddam. They had a ton of questions.
Franks had, at one point, used five Navy aircraft carriers for the Afghanistan operation, so how many
would be needed for Iraq? How do you refresh or rotate the force in a long war? What about presumed weapons
of mass destruction? What would the Iraqi response be? What would Israel do if it was attacked? How do you
take Baghdad, the capital, with a population of 5 million?
The Army chief, General Eric K. Shinseki, expressed concern about the logistical support for a massive
invasion of a country the size of Iraq. How would the force on the ground be sustained? What size of force
would really be needed to be successful?
Wolfowitz and the policy crowd thought war with Iraq would be relatively easy, one chief said. Did
Franks a
ree?