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

242 The Road to Safwan
different standards than the troopers of the Desert Storm were
familiar with in 1991.
However, the achievements of the earlier war should not be
diminished by the more recent conflict in the same area of the
world. By any measure of evaluation, this squadron, like the remainder
of the 1st Infantry Division, was successful in the 1991
war. It accomplished each task assigned, fought with distinction,
and brought all of its troopers home without serious injury.
Of course there can be no doubt that it fought this campaign
against an enemy who was simply not in the same
league. The Iraqi Army had two strengths: a lot of solid equipment
and many brave soldiers. Other than that, it had no business
being on the same battlefield as the United States Army. It
had an incompetent chain of command that had no appreciation
of military leadership, operational art, or fundamental tactics.
Its soldiers were poorly trained in basic combat skills and
lacked proficiency in fundamental crew drills such as tank and
artillery gunnery. In each and every tactical engagement
against the 1-4 Cavalry, they lost. Yet, this was the same army
that had inflicted tens of thousands of casualties on the Iranian
Army only a few years earlier.
LTC Robert Wilson brought a squadron to the battlefield
that represented the epitome of what a combat unit should be.
It had a solid, experienced, chain of command that trusted each
other from the commander down to each track commander.
The individual soldier, even those who had only recently joined
the squadron, was extremely proficient in his individual skills
and each crew knew how to fight its combat equipment. The
two main types of weapons systems, air and ground, complemented
each other and worked as a team as they had never before.
In addition, adding tanks back into the squadron organization
was a smart move and the decisive element when the
squadron encountered heavy forces at Objective Norfolk and
on the Basra Road. American leaders had learned the hard way
the value of armored protection in World War II, Korea, and
Vietnam. The army’s leaders had learned their lessons from
Vietnam, and rebuilt the force from the bottom up with superb
training, leadership, and doctrine. It was not the technology
that made this squadron successful, but the quality of its offi-