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

22 The Road to Safwan
headquarters troop, and the aircrews into the air troops commanded
by captains. Neither the ground nor the air commanders
were satisfied with this organization. Therefore, in mid-September,
Wilson and Mowery adjusted what was, in their minds,
an inefficient structure. As a minimum, there appeared to be a
lack of cooperation between ground and air leaders. Certainly,
the aviation maintenance problems were an indication that the
brigade needed to make some changes. So, they resurrected a
semblance of the old organization in an attempt both to solve
the problems they were aware of and to centralize the control of
their aviation systems. They gave CPT Peter G. Smith command
of E Troop (Provisional) and appointed Master Sergeant
(MSG) Robert H. Gdula his first sergeant. They then transferred
to them all aviation-specific maintenance soldiers and equipment.
Of course, since the army had not approved this change,
this adjustment created a completely new array of administrative
problems as senior supply and personnel officers failed to
recognize the new unit as legitimate. 9 Finally, Wilson made CPT
Christopher Philbrick the new squadron flight operations officer,
responsible for the coordination and execution of all the air
troop missions. Based upon those responsibilities, Philbrick became
known as the “commander of air troops.”
In addition to training and reorganizing the squadron, Wilson
and his leaders had to supervise the integration of a wide
array of new and improved equipment. One of the lessons cavalrymen
learned during World War II was that they could not
always rely on simple reconnaissance and observation to discover
information about the enemy. They often had to fight to
gather the kind of information needed by senior commanders.
In most instances, light vehicles were not sufficient and senior
leaders had augmented the cavalry with tanks. Postwar cavalry
leaders took these lessons to heart and assigned light or
medium tanks to the cavalry. Time dulls such memories and by
1990, the army had pulled all of the tanks away from the divisional
cavalry in a decision most armor officers deplored. Removing
tanks from the cavalry squadron was not doctrinally
based, but in response to the limited number of soldiers available
to man the new Division 86 force structure. While it seemed
logical at the Pentagon, armor officers constantly sought ways