The Road to Safwan: The 1st Squadron, 4th Cavalry in the 1991 ...

9 Final Preparations
On February 18, as Task Force Iron was
completing its mission north of the berm,
Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney approved
General Schwarzkopf’s recommendation that the
ground campaign should begin on February 24. 1 Across the
theater of war, artillery, army helicopters, and close-air support
aircraft began shifting their strikes away from targets in the
heart of Iraq to those enemy units defending along the border
against the coalition arrayed in Saudi Arabia. At 1100 hours the
morning of February 18, the division commander placed the
1-4 Cavalry under the operational control of COL Maggart’s
1st Brigade. 2
The Iraqi Army had more than 300,000 soldiers in and
around Kuwait to meet an American-led offensive. Expecting
the main thrust to follow the Wadi Al Batin, the Iraqis arrayed
their forces in a series of echelons. Along the border were standard
infantry divisions, usually deployed with two brigades
forward and one to the rear. They had almost no mobility and
had the mission of defending the border and absorbing the initial
allied attack. Ironically, it was the Iraqi VII Corps, with four
infantry divisions, that prepared to defend against the U.S. VII
Corps. Behind these static units was a heavy division, the 52nd
Armored, acting as the Iraqi corps’s mobile reserve and designed
to counterattack against the initial American penetrations.
Located in depth, astride the Wadi Al Batin, was the theater
reserve, the 10th and 12th Armored Divisions. Called the
Operation Jihad Corps, its mission was counter-penetration
and counterattack. Finally, positioned farther to the rear was
the Iraqi Army’s strategic reserve, the Republican Guard Forces
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