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

136 The Road to Safwan
the enemy units in the division’s zone and pass on their location
to the following brigades. In response to the division scheme of
maneuver, Wilson organized the squadron with A Troop in the
north in a zone about eight to ten kilometers wide maintaining
contact with the 3rd Armored Division, and B Troop in the south
in a slightly larger zone. Because of the different axes of advance
between the 1st Infantry Division about to move to the northeast,
and the 1st British Armoured Division in the south, moving
eastward, there would be a growing gap between the divisions
and more potential for discovering bypassed Iraqi units.
Hence, the decision to place B Troop, with its three more tanks,
on the southern route. The aeroscout weapons teams would
work with the ground units to help speed the recon effort and to
provide flank security for the squadron. The squadron logistics
elements would follow the lead troops in the zone of advance. 5
After the TOC sent instructions to the troop commanders to
report for orders at 2000 hours, the staff officers began the
process of developing a fragmentary order to guide the
squadron’s movement. Essential to this phase was graphically
displaying the scheme of maneuver on paper and reproducing
it on sheets, called overlays, that subordinate units could place
on their own battle maps. However, the map problem now became
serious. Up to now, the squadron had been able to work
from detailed maps in the area around the breach. This new
mission required them to travel a great distance and there were
simply not enough operational (1:250,000 scale) or more detailed
tactical (1:50,000) maps for all the soldiers who needed
them. In addition, the graphics themselves reproduced by SGM
Shields and the S3 shop on the Diazo machine were hard to use
at the squadron/troop level. Now the value of the Global Positioning
System became obvious. The staff developed a series of
checkpoints, or predetermined locations. These locations,
which were entered into each GPS, took precedence over the
less accurate hand-drawn graphics. As a result, the orders
handed out at the meeting were quite simple, with only checkpoints,
unit boundaries, phase lines, and Objective Norfolk indicated
on the attached map overlays. 6
With the warning order came the requirement for a task reorganization.
The squadron needed to ensure that those elements