Posted on 03/22/2003 6:53:57 PM PST by Pokey78
Profile: Tommy Franks
'Showtime!" yelled the head of Central Command (CentCom) into the night air, stepping off the plane the other week in Qatar, the headquarters of the allied operation. After 18 months, showtime finally arrived, early on Thursday morning, not quite the way Tommy Franks envisioned it and not the way the Pentagon generals wanted it.
According to Friday's Guardian ("The price of overconfidence") and New York Times ("It was the Iraqis who seemed to have the initiative"), it's all going horribly wrong. But you never know, the Guardian and Times chaps could be mistaken. Things might actually be going rather well, and the audacious bunker-busting opening of Gulf War II might go down in military history as a textbook example of how to plan meticulously and seize your opportunity.
Whether Tommy Franks also goes down in history is a trickier question, depending on who's leaking against whom at the Pentagon. He is not a personality general, not like gruff, grizzled Stormin' Norman Schwarzkopf of Gulf War I. At joint press conferences with Don Rumsfeld, it's the Defence Secretary who is the quotable one, with Franks as a not terribly enthusiastic straight man. But the fact remains: in the space of a year and a half, Franks has fought and (pace The Guardian) won two of the most remarkable wars of the modern age.
Afghanistan was "the graveyard of empire", everybody knew that; bombing could never cow the mighty Pashtun warrior, humbler of great powers since time immemorial. But Franks did in a few weeks what the Soviets were unable to do in a decade. Critics who moan that there are still too few women in the Afghan cabinet, etc, are missing the point: a country that was one big training camp for terrorists is no longer. That is all Franks needed to accomplish. Anything else is a bonus.
The general won't get off so lightly in Iraq. For an undefined period - maybe a couple of few months, maybe a year - he will be the MacArthur of Mesopotamia. The British Government was not in favour of this plan (Mr Blair wanted the UN in charge) nor was the Pentagon (Secretary Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz are strong supporters of the Iraqi National Congress). Nor was Franks, who is happy to fight the war but reluctant to see CentCom get saddled with the peace. But the State Department despises the INC and would rather have Franks as military governor.
He won't be called that, of course, but, whatever niceties are observed, for the foreseeable future he will be where the buck stops in Iraq. If all goes well, he'll hand over to a broad, representative, democratic, loosely confederal government. Till then he will be roughly analogous to his closest pal in the region, Pakistan's General Musharraf, a uniformed strongman presiding over a turbulent Muslim populace.
Franks is a lean, 6 ft 3 in, drawling Texan a couple of years shy of 60. He walks a little stiffly - his legs are scarred from Vietnam, where he was seriously wounded. To his detractors, he is almost a physical embodiment of everything that's wrong with the post-'Nam military: stolid, slow-moving, overly cautious. The ever-peppy Rummy, 13 years older, returned to Washington determined to remodel America's Cold War armed services for a new century: he wants small, light, mobile forces with a flair for improvisation. That doesn't, at first glance, seem to be Franks's style.
For months, the newspapers have been full of Beltway tittle-tattle about how the Pentagon brass was resisting Rumsfeld on Iraq. Last year, the general came to his boss with an invasion plan calling for five divisions and five aircraft carriers. The Defence Secretary told him to go away and halve the numbers, rethink along Rumsfeldian lines, lots of special forces and high-tech laser stuff. But here we are with the war under way in a curious hybrid form - Franks has pretty much all the manpower he asked for (a quarter of a million or so), but there's a lot of fleet-footed Rummy-style surgical strikes going on. Posterity will decide which man should get credit for what.
If Tommy Franks has a preference for good old-fashioned GIs - the "grunts", the humble enlisted men, the army's "blue-collar workers", as he puts it - it is because that is how he started out. He didn't go to West Point. Instead, he dropped out of college and joined the army as a 20-year-old private in 1965. He grew up in the same town as George and Laura Bush - Midland, Texas.
Tommy Ray Franks was a year ahead of Laura at Robert E Lee High School, but he didn't make much of an impression on her. He was a nondescript youth - according to the principal, Tommy Ray was the kind who doesn't bloom until adulthood. He was the son of a mechanic, not an oilman. So, while George W left Midland to go to Yale, Tommy Ray went to the local state college, and their paths never crossed until four decades later when Osama bin Laden struck New York and Washington.
In between, Franks served in Vietnam, South Korea, Germany and the Gulf. Before shipping out for Vietnam, he went on a blind date to Doctor Zhivago and found the love of his life, Cathy Carley. He married her in 1969, telling her that he would soon be done with the army. Thirty-four years later, he is still yoked to both of them, though it is not entirely clear he knows where to draw the line between. A Pentagon investigation last year found that he'd let the missus sit in on classified briefings - an extraordinary security lapse, particularly after September 11.
By then, the college drop-out had worked his way up to Central Command, which he took over in June 2000. CentCom oversees American military interests in the most explosive region on the planet, from Somalia to Kashmir. It was no secret, even before September 11, that Rumsfeld thought that a lot of his generals weren't up to snuff. His announcement of the retirement of Army Chief of Staff General Shinseki was widely felt to be a humiliation for the man, compounded when Paul Wolfowitz publicly slapped down Shinseki over his estimates of how many troops would be required to garrison Iraq.
By contrast, Rumsfeld had a discreet word with Franks about letting Mrs F in on classified material, more or less swept it under the carpet, and makes a point of hailing him as "a wise and inspiring commander". To his grandchildren, Franks is affectionately known as "Pooh", after the well-known "bear of little brain", and the word around town was that in private Rummy did not fundamentally disagree with the grandkids' assessment. Franks, for his part, thinks his boss is too easily dazzled by a lot of gee-whiz gadgetry and fancypants special forces. The pair have come to embody two sides of an intellectual divide in the Pentagon.
His defenders say it is his manner that causes folks to underestimate him. The man who launched "Shock and Awe" on Baghdad is all shucks and aw around Washington. His detractors say the notion that the folksiness disguises a keen intelligence is misleading. "He sometimes seems to want to come across as one of these aw-shucks, sneaky-smart kind of guys. It's impossible to judge whether he's really sneaky-smart, or sneaky-average," says General Merrill McPeak, the top Air Force man in Gulf War I, who describes Franks as "not overwhelmingly impressive".
But the GIs love him as one of their own. At Thanksgiving in Afghanistan, he delighted the troops with his rendition of the Charley Pride classic, Is Anyone Going to San Antone? If things go badly wrong in post-war Iraq, Tommy Franks will be going back to San Antone sooner than he thinks. On the other hand, if Iraq emerges as Araby's first real democracy, he'll get a lot of the credit. But as the general sang on stage that night:
"Wind whippin' down the neck of my
shirt like I ain't got nothin' on
But I'd rather fight the wind and rain
than what I was fightin' at home . . ."
In other words, while the Rumsfeld revolution rampages through the Pentagon, dealing with the Kurds and Shi'ites may be a welcome relief.
Hell ... Senator Hildabeast is in on all of our military secrets. If she's entitled to a clearance what's the problem?
Visited Odessa, Texas (Midland/Odessa) years ago and remember water from the Permian Basin acquifer was, shall we say, memorable. I'm told Sweetwater, Texas came by its' name because it actually had good water; West Texas water in general is terrible.
If there's an aquifer here, it's news to me...we get our water from Lake Ivey. I'm sure it's much better at the source, but after being piped 150 miles to Midland, it's not so tasty anymore.
Please let me know if you want ON or OFF my Texas or General Interest ping list!. . .don't be shy.
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