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

15 Postwar Operations
Even before the beginning of the ground war,
General Schwarzkopf’s Central Command
had developed two separate but complementary
plans to implement after the battle was over. First,
coalition forces had to continue to defend Kuwait and help to restore
its government to power. In addition to combat service
support units to help the Kuwaiti government clean up its land
and restore order, the United States intended to keep a division
in the country to ensure a stable environment in the postwar period.
American troops would also remain in occupied Iraq until
Saddam Hussein’s government signed a peace agreement. The
second operation, which had to be coordinated with the first,
was to start pulling American troops out of Southwest Asia as
soon as the conflict was over. The U.S. government was determined
to bring the soldiers home as soon as possible. Planning
for this activity began way back in the first week of February,
with the concept ready to go at the end of the month. The number
one priority was to get the XVIII Airborne Corps, which had
been in country since early August, on its way back home. 1
Rumors had been running rampant for days after the
Safwan meeting that the squadron would be heading home
shortly. On March 4, however, LTC Wilson received the first
hint that this was only a rumor, and the next day Central Command
made the formal decision to start the process of pulling
LTG Gary Luck’s XVIII Corps out of Iraq. The VII Corps staff
began issuing orders to its units to start moving them into the
locations vacated by the departing units. First, the 3rd Armored
Division, which would be remaining in Kuwait after the bulk of
the corps withdrew, exchanged places with the 1st Infantry Di-
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