Word: centcom
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Central Command (CENTCOM) is one of the strangest organizations in the U.S. military. It has no troops to call its own, just responsibility for a huge arc of turf, from the Horn of Africa to Pakistan, that is home to some of the world's most dangerous neighborhoods. Franks' job--held in the past by such men as Norman Schwarzkopf and Anthony Zinni--is to meet and befriend the civilian leaders of each of the region's 25 countries in case the U.S. needs to drop in on short notice to clean things up. When that time comes, the general...
...Rumsfeld got a fair chunk of what he wanted too: more special forces than Franks preferred, a faster race to Baghdad than the general had originally envisioned and a quicker start to the ground war than the Centcom chief had proposed. Rumsfeld also wanted the air and ground campaigns to start simultaneously; if war begins late next week, one will quickly follow the other. "Rumsfeld is particularly enamored of special-operations stuff, and Franks is less so, and that was reflected in how the Iraq plan came together," a senior Centcom officer says. "The two of them tugged and massaged...
...from MacDill Air Force Base, 7,700 miles from Kabul. The command center at MacDill monitors all the intelligence from the region and beams Franks' orders to his field generals. Last week he directed the largest fight of the war so far. A few days before Operation Anaconda began, Centcom gave TIME photographer Christopher Morris a rare opportunity to capture the action...
...points where the geologist predicted they would act like jackhammers on rocky cliffs. The tactic had the advantage of surprise: enemy forces, relieved to see bombs explode at a distance, faced a rocky tidal wave seconds later. While there are no estimates of the number killed in the avalanches, Centcom considers the strategy a success, and could use it again when facing an enemy in rocky terrain. In addition to the casualties, says Air Force Lieut. Colonel Bradley Jones, "it had a tremendous psychological effect...
...helicopter-down U.S. military casualties in a decade hasn't come close to derailing public support for the fight they died in - is the attitude of men like Tommy Franks. Franks has mostly steered clear of the news media and stuck to the inside of his war room at CENTCOM headquarters at Fort MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, letting Rumsfeld be his front man and press-jouster...