For every one of Gen. Tommy Franks’ dramatic battlefield successes, a question is raised about the strategy of the man who is leading American forces in their war with Iraq.
Under Franks’ command, U.S. forces toppled the terror-supporting Taliban in Afghanistan in four months. But a critical decision Franks and his staff made in Tora Bora might have allowed Osama bin Laden, the most wanted terrorist in the world, to escape.
In Afghanistan, Franks oversaw a whole new style of warfare, featuring Special Forces troops on horseback and missile-firing automated airplanes. But the first battle plan he presented had none of those new twists and was rejected by the Pentagon for relying too heavily on masses of basic infantry.
With his self-effacing, Texas country-boy demeanor, Franks has won the confidence of President Bush and the admiration of his troops. But a Pentagon inquiry concluded in mid-March that he had wrongly allowed his wife, Cathy, to sit in on top-secret military business. Two other charges against him, that he had a military officer run errands for his wife and a military guard protect her, were dismissed as “unsubstantiated.” Still, some saw the probe as a distraction for Franks on the eve of war.
And so the questions remain about the four-star general who is leading a force of about 300,000 troops in what he calls “the first war of the 21st Century,” an operation requiring ever-faster analysis and decisions with the complications posed by oil field sabotage, sandstorms, ethnic tensions and the potential use of chemical and biological weapons.
Franks’ detractors, including some military colleagues, say the head of the U.S. Central Command and one-time enlisted artilleryman is too rooted in old-school methods, not creative enough in deploying Special Forces units and too slow to effectively incorporate all the armed services into his thinking.
His supporters counter by pointing at a long career of innovation, from his push to improve technology in the Army after the 1991 Persian Gulf war to earlier days, when he loaded targets onto down-range train cars so his artillerymen could practice shooting at unseen things in motion.
The current war plan “is built on flexibility beyond any that I have seen in the course of my service,” Franks, 57, said in his first briefing on the war Saturday at his forward command center in Doha. “Much has been said and written about this business of one plan good enough and another not, and so forth. … The fact of the matter is that for a period of about a year, a great deal of intense planning and a great deal of what-iffing by all of us has gone into this.”
Franks’ friends and colleagues insist that he is the right man at the right time, not only because of his long and varied experience in the army but also because he is a “quick study” who showed in Afghanistan that he is able to adjust his thinking when he must.
“He comes across as a poor old dumb Texas boy, but he’s one of the most astute leaders I’ve met,” said retired Army Col. Joe House, a friend of Franks’ from Tampa.
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He sings, fixes cars
A diplomat who’s down-home is at the core of Franks, a country-singing Texan with a command of current events far beyond military matters and a love of repairing cars.
Franks is this war’s Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, but he has made it clear that he has no intention of being as talkative as the first gulf war’s commander. In the first few days of the war, Franks didn’t give a briefing in the $250,000 press room at Central Command.
Discussing the first book he had ever read, Franks said recently, “It was a book about Julius Caesar. I remember parts of it. The book said Julius Caesar was a general. He made long speeches. They killed him.”
His grandchildren call him “Pooh,” even while they too needle him over why he was not able to track down bin Laden.
Franks was born in Oklahoma but grew up in Midland, Texas, then an idyllic mid-American company town. There he went to school with President Bush’s wife, Laura, at Robert E. Lee High School and played football amid the wind-blown grit, fierce rivalries and passionate community support the sport enjoys in West Texas.
A look through Franks’ senior yearbook shows that leadership roles emerged later in his life. The 1963 book includes just two pictures of him, a formal class photograph with his trademark lopsided smile and another taken from behind him at a high school dance. Franks’ height and telltale ears give him away in the crowd.
In a football team picture from Franks’ junior year, high school classmate Bill Bain points out the future general standing in the back row, No. 66. He is skinny for a linebacker, with a grin and “aw, shucks” tilt to his head.
“You can almost hear him saying, `Ain’t it great?'” Bain said. “Regardless of the circumstance.”
Franks cruised the family’s Chevy between the drive-ins on Midland’s Big Spring Road on weekends and got laughs when he admitted to Midland’s most prominent citizens at a luncheon last spring that he used to sneak onto one prominent family’s ranch to shoot at jackrabbits in the mesquite.
He gave up those rabbit hunts for college and then gave up college to enlist in the Army in 1965. He soon was flying low over Vietnam on heart-stopping missions to radio enemy positions back to American artillery units, an experience that earned him ribbons for his uniform and a bullet scar for his leg.
The Army’s mentoring system recognized him as a rising star as early as the 1970s: He was picked for officer training despite having no college degree and met his wife while assisting the second in command at the Army’s artillery school in Ft. Sill, Okla.
They married when he returned from Vietnam, and he earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration from the University of Texas at Arlington in 1971, thanks to an Army “bootstraps” program.
Oom-pah-pah and country
Later, while serving in Germany as captain of a small artillery unit, he was known for his country singing in German taverns. It was a pastime he continued years later when singing a rendition of Garth Brooks’ “Friends in Low Places” to his unit before they departed for the gulf war in 1991.
It was in Germany in 1981, as head of an artillery battalion, that Franks began showing an aggressive, inventive style, said retired Gen. Crosbie “Butch” Saint, his commanding officer at the time.
Together, the two collaborated to create a new procedure in which artillery units followed closely behind and almost within sight of advancing tanks and soldiers.
“The fight starts immediately and the [artillery has] range as the fight continues. They’re already within 1,000 yards of the enemy,” Saint said, calling both the suggestion and Franks “very innovative.”
After earning a master’s degree from Shippensburg University and attending Army War College, Franks returned to develop the new but deceptively simple method of using moving train cars to teach spotters and artillerymen to destroy moving targets that are out of sight.
Gulf war brigadier general
In the gulf war, Franks was a brigadier general in the 1st Cavalry Division, where he led “from the fray” as much as possible, said his retired commander, Gen. John Tilelli.
After the war, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Gordon Sullivan picked Franks to outline a means to weave emerging computer technology into the Army’s daily use and doctrine, one of Sullivan’s pet projects for modernizing the army.
After a stint in Korea, Franks was given control of the Central Command in Tampa, which oversees U.S. strategic interests from Africa to Afghanistan. He had been on the job for just over a year when terrorists struck on Sept. 11, 2001.
Franks’ initial battle plan for the Afghan campaign was criticized as too bulky and time-consuming; Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld favored a faster operation entailing heavy air power and light, flexible ground elements.
After the initial plan was turned back, Franks adjusted quickly. During that time, his rethinking almost certainly was affected by a lunch at Tampa’s MacDill Air Force Base with a longtime friend, Gen. Peter Schoomaker, who until recently was head of the U.S. Special Forces Command.
Without commenting on what was discussed at the lunch, Schoomaker recently told the Tribune that Franks is “a quick study” who “understands joint warfare.”
While Franks’ initial plan caused consternation among leaders in other military branches, one participant in the Afghanistan planning process said, “It’s clear that he quickly grasped the full spectrum of available tools in the available kit, and over time has made use of them.”
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Franks’ critics say that bin Laden escaped at least partly due to the general’s decision to rely on Northern Alliance militia fighters to flush Al Qaeda guerrillas from the Tora Bora hills. Some saw that decision as a desire not to risk as many American casualties.
In Iraq, Franks faces a campaign that could stretch into a brutal desert summer and entail a knot of interservice military demands, untested fighting skills and Middle East politics.
While the questions remain, many who have worked with Franks say he is the general they want in charge.
“I think we have the right guy in the right place at the right time, right now,” said Tilelli, Frank’s former commander. “The issue is the experiences he had that set him up for this job.”