Norman Schwarzkopf And The Vietnam War

Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf commanded a force larger and more complex than the D-Day invasion in WWII and didn’t want a ground war. Aka “Stormin’ Norman,” as he came to be known, was a highly-decorated and respected Vietnam War veteran. He commanded a Coalition of 670,000 personnel from 28 countries, along with combined Naval and Air Forces, with 425,000 troops from the United States. According to his memoirs, he implemented his operational plan to defend Saudi Arabia and expel Iraq from Kuwait using Gen. Colin Powell’s (then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) doctrine of overwhelming force and incorporated Montgomery’s desert armor tactics from the second battle of El-Alamein in World War II, all in an effort to minimize casualties on both

Norman Schwarzkopf Jr., was able to build cohesive teams through mutual trust and establish unity of effort across the diverse coalition that formed to remove Iraqi forces from Kuwait. As captured in a U.S. Naval War College paper entitled, “Theater Organization: A Command and Control Framework and Analysis,” his ability to build cohesive teams and establish unity of effort was aided by the “political consensus among these nations that Iraq‘s aggression against its neighbor, Kuwait, was unfounded and unacceptable…. This became the basis for the coalition‘s common purpose and provided the ‘cohesive glue’.” General Schwarzkopf‘s experience from dealing with international forces during his two tours of service in Vietnam played a key role in enabling him to maintain this

Schwarzkopf. The national interests of forces involved in a multinational operation may lead to potential conflicts. Alliances can deal with these issues by established command and control structures that take into account differences in national procedures. These structures have personnel from each of the alliance members, who become integral to the A recent example of parallel command structure is the coalition operation in the Persian Gulf War (Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm), in which Western coalition forces came under the control of a US force commander General Schwarzkopf, and the Arab and Muslim coalition forces came under the control of a Saudi force commander General Khaled Bin Sultan. General Schwarzkopf understood that the coalition’s efforts against Iraq were extremely vulnerable to cultural sensitivities, and therefore he made sure to foster cross-cultural interaction throughout the campaign (Dickinson, 2004). In addition, the use of culturally aware liaison teams in the parallel headquarters also contributed to the success of the parallel command structure (Dickinson, 2004). In short, the recognition and accommodation of Arab cultural differences were essential in gaining consensus and maintaining cohesion within the coalition. Although General Khaled bin Sultan recognized that the US would make the ultimate command decisions, the parallel command