Word: 101st
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...Bravo Company, part of the 502nd Brigade of the 101st Airborne, the battle for Karbala started ahead of schedule on the morning of April 5. Bravo was still two blocks south of its first objective, a water-treatment plant, when it began taking fire. "We were two minutes in, and we were in full contact," said Sergeant Mark de la Garza...
...German strategist Helmut von Moltke once observed, "No plan survives contact with the enemy." For the 101st Airborne Division that dictum struck with a vengeance. But, according to LTC Lehr this was a good thing. "In the past, the Army has had a tendency to try and fight according to plan, not according to what the enemy or situation dictated," he said. "This time we adopted our plans to what the enemy was doing." Moltke would have understood. His second dictum states, "War is a matter of expedients...
...Major Frank, plans are meant to be changed. He says, "Though we never pulled off any of our plans, they became the baseline for everything we did." Units of the 101st were, in fact, constantly dragging out old plans whenever they received new missions. Many times, the old plan was just fine with a few modifications of times and locations and some new analysis of what enemy they might find on the ground...
...according to plan did not mean that they were unprepared. As one soldier said, "We trained for urban combat, for a possible street fight in Baghdad. That same training works just as well in An Najaf." It also worked fine in Karbala and Hilla, two other cities where the 101st had to squelch strong paramilitary resistance, which had not been in the original plan...
...Though nothing went according to plan, another dictum applies: there is no arguing with success. While none of the 101st Airborne's plans were executed, by the end of last week 101st soldiers were patrolling the streets of Baghdad and the Iraqi Army had ceased to exist. But some things never change. The end of the week found staff planners preparing to move North to secure Kirkuk, continue to occupy Baghdad, patrol all of southern Iraq, and redeploy back to the United States. No one knows what the final mission will be, but there will surely be a plan...