Desert Redleg: Artillery Warfare in the First Gulf War. L. Scott Lingamfelter. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2020.
Desert Redleg: Artillery Warfare in the First Gulf War is a well-written, engaging story of an artillery unit during the war to liberate Kuwait from Iraq in 1991. The author, L. Scott Lingamfelter, brings together his service during the Gulf War, his training as a Middle East analyst, and nearly 30 years of perspective and reflection to produce this valuable contribution to the literature.
The book’s title alone might suggest a more general history or analysis of the use of artillery in the Gulf War, but the book is primarily a wartime memoir framed by the experiences of a senior artilleryman whose perspectives were shaped in the Cold War’s final decade. As a memoir, Desert Redleg lands somewhere between the classic campaign and sentimental forms.[1] In an appendix, the author dedicates a chapter to lessons of the war gleaned from a broader military and geo-political perspective.
Desert Redleg recounts a field grade officer’s view of the preparation, deployment, operation, and redeployment of the 1st Infantry Division’s Division Artillery (DIVARTY). It adds to the body of literature on the Gulf War and builds on the storied Big Red One (BRO) bibliography of the war in the mold of Greg Fontenot’s The First Infantry Division and the U.S. Army Transformed: Road to Victory in Desert Storm, 1970-1991 and Stephen A. Bourque and John W. Burden’s The Road to Safwan: The 1st Squadron, 4th Cavalry in the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
War memoirs are a complex mix of fact and foggy memory, often held together with a dab or two of what Paul Fussel called the “necessity of fiction in any memorable testimony about fact.”[2] This is not a critique, but rather an acknowledgment of its nature and, from a historical point of view, unique value. War memoirs can range from deeply emotional retellings to quasi-official unit narratives focused on the material facts—in the end, they fortify the idiosyncratic context that is so often lost to time. No doubt the stories have, like many memories, improved in the 30 years between events and publication, but the author’s narrative seems well-supported by his personal diary of events, the shared remembrances of his fellow soldiers, and the works of fellow veterans.
Lingamfelter’s story unfolds across 13 balanced chapters. The first quarter of the book sets the context for the narrative with a brief organizational history of the Big Red One, a nostalgic description of its home in Fort Riley, Kansas, and the stoicism of a generation that had not seen major war: “[w]e quietly and soberly accepted the notion of heavy losses…that’s what soldiers are trained to expect, and do.” The division’s deployment to Saudi Arabia at the tail end of Desert Shield is described in the aptly titled chapter “A first-class ride to confusion.” It was the quintessential modern American military experience: deploying to combat in the first-class section of a commercial airliner. The first battle, however, was not with Iraq’s forces in Kuwait. The “Iron Mountain”—that infamously undifferentiated collection of recently off-loaded combat vehicles, every category of supply, and the general paraphernalia of war—proved a daunting and unexpected foe. Moving the division through this ad hoc rear-area bureaucracy to its forward assembly was, in the author’s telling, “like untying a Gordian knot with one hand while playing with a Rubik’s Cube with the other.”[3]
The book’s combat narrative captures the actions of the DIVARTY from the perspective of its senior staff, and runs through three chapters. Combat actions during this war were characteristically short, sharp, and manifestly one-sided; however, this does not detract from the narrative as a war story. The career officers of 1991 were keenly aware that they were about to be graded on the multi-generational investment made in anticipation of a war with the Soviet Union. They were the objective version of a force built around the much-acclaimed AirLand Battle concept. By almost any metric of readiness, the Big Red One and other U.S. forces were perhaps better prepared for battle than any American Army fielded before. It is easy today to appreciate this force’s advantages over its Iraqi adversary, but the balance was less certain in 1991. As the author makes clear, leaders were outwardly confident, but very aware that their forces had never been tested.
From an individual participant’s perspective, the arduous preparations, the stress of the unknown, and the inherent risks of maneuvering thousands of armed men and women into battle were as visceral in this war as in any other. In the end, the combat test was, blessedly, muted. The Big Red One’s DIVARTY led the largest battlefield artillery force since the Second World War, but it did not face a peer. Desert Redleg captures well the fact that most combat deployments are spent in preparation, movement, confusion, and waiting only occasionally interrupted by short bursts of overwhelming violence. Most combat memoirs quickly move through the former to dwell on the latter. In this sense, the author’s telling is more indicative of the experience of being there despite the war’s 100-hour duration and generally one-sided nature of the violence.
The last three chapters cover DIVARTY’s role in stage-setting for the cease-fire negotiations, the interminable purgatory of post-operations reconstitution, and, ultimately, the tedious and bureaucratic—but joyous—redeployment home. An artillery commander’s role in setting conditions for General Schwarzkopf’s meeting with the Iraqis at Safwan airfield offers a useful metaphor for the entire conflict. The artillery commander makes an offer that the Iraqis occupying Safwan could not refuse: “I regret to inform you that if you do not leave by 1600 hours, I will be forced to kill your soldiers.”[4]
The author occasionally repeats an anecdote or order of battle detail, but it does not detract from the narrative; as a memoir, Desert Redleg reveals the generational nostalgia of a late Cold War-era soldier and the pride of being affiliated with the storied history of the Big Red One. Lingamfelter is also clear about his goal in correcting a perceived historical slight by telling “a story not addressed in other works of this nature, specifically, the performance of the Field Artillery in Desert Storm” In his view, the hype surrounding the great Left-Hook maneuver, the rapid advance of mechanized infantry and armored units into Iraq, and the amplified air campaign with made-for-TV bomb-camera footage effectively diminished the contributions of the “king of battle.” Even the Iraqis take some of the blame for disrespecting the king by being a “feckless opponent.”[5] While such branch or service jealousies may be inevitable, it seems an awkward diversion from the polished prose that proceeds and follows it.
The final chapter, “Retrospective and Reality—Did We get the Job Done?” is the weakest. Most of the entries are dedicated to a general lessons-learned survey of the war’s specific tactical and operational implications; all seem logical—if the goal were to create a better Desert Storm force. And while not surprising in a memoir, it risks fixing the future context to the one in the past. Perhaps this is the inevitable limitation of all lessons-learned efforts that are easier to collect than to apply to the context and character of the next war. The author also argues, “Saddam was ripe for the taking, and we were poised to accomplish the mission.”[6] This musing about the road not taken is interesting because (as opposed to other such counterfactual histories) there is evidence for how such an operation might have unfolded. The late Colin Gray sums it up well: “Frequently it is just assumed that a heap of anticipated tactical victories will assume an operational significance that must, miraculously almost, produce the desired strategic result. It should be needless to add that this approach to the use of force for policy ends is almost criminally irresponsible, even though it can succeed occasionally.”[7] Needless to say, I am unconvinced that simply marching to Baghdad in 1991 would have somehow overcome the policy, strategy, and operational planning failures that were manifest in Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003.
Notwithstanding the somewhat limited value of the book’s final chapter, military history (including memoirs like this one) plays a general and highly utilitarian role in the profession of arms. A soldier’s study of other combatants’ past ordeals is essential if one is to avoid the limitations of one’s lived experiences. It is perhaps not too great an exaggeration to say that the generation of Redlegs after 1991 saw a decline in their relative operational value, and as a measure of relative role, the prestige of artillery. Artillery may have still been the “king” but the scale and nature of its kingdom changed after 1991. The experiential gap between the kind of large-scale artillery deployment and employment described in Desert Redleg and, the short march-up to Baghdad in 2003 excepted, most of the operational artillery experience of the past 30 years is significant. A decade of fire support to co-called Military Operations Other Than War, followed by almost two decades of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations has generated creative but relatively small-scale solutions (and associated experiences) to the indirect-fire challenges of the 21st Century. One need only examine artillery’s role in the ongoing war in Ukraine and rumors of a potential Great Power war to appreciate the value of the insights that an earlier generation might offer. Vicariously experiencing the challenges of deploying and employing artillery at scale (at one point the Big Red One’s DIVARTY controlled ten battalions of rocket and mixed tube artillery) may, if considered in today’s context, help a new generation of Redlegs to wrestle with the question: “Are we ready?”
Dr. Kevin Woods is the Deputy Director of the Joint Advanced Warfighting Division at the Institute for Defense Analyses, Alexandria, VA. The views, opinions, and findings expressed in this paper should not be construed as representing the official position of either the Institute for Defense Analyses or the Department of Defense.
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Header Image: An M109 Paladin gun crew with 4th Battalion, 1st Field Artillery Regiment, Division Artillery at Fort Bliss, Texas, fires into the mountains of Oro Grande Range Complex, New Mexico, in 2018 (Spc. Gabrielle Weaver/U.S. Army)
Notes:
[1] Neil Ramsey, “A Lively School of Writing,” in War Stories: The War Memoir in History and Literature, Phillip Dwyer’s (Berghahn Books, 2016), 48.
[2] Paul Fussel, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford University Press, 2013), 337.
[3] L. Scott Lingamfelter, Artillery Warfare in the First Gulf War (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky: 2020), 49.
[4] Lingamfelter, Desert Redleg, 197.
[5] Lingamfelter, Desert Redleg, 4.
[6] Lingamfelter, Desert Redleg, 280.
[7] Colin Gray, “Forward,” in Iraq & the Evolution of American Strategy, Steven Metz (Potomac Books, 2008), ix.