Desert Warrior: A Personal View of the Gulf War by the Joint Forces Commander

By HRH General Khaled Bin Sultan, written with Patrick Seale. HarperCollins, New York, 1995, 492 pp. List: $35; AET: $25.

Reviewed by Richard H. Curtiss

For U.S. military officers, an academic year at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, KS or the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base, AL, or a session at the U.S. Naval Post-Graduate School at Monterey, CA is a challenging but necessary prerequisite to senior officer status. Although most officers welcome the intense intellectual activity involved in such an assignment, few would choose to repeat it.

So what is one to make of an officer-graduate of all three of those august U.S. military institutions, who also happens to be a graduate of Britain's prestigious Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst and who holds a master's degree in political science from Auburn University at Montgomery, AL? Clearly the author of this book, His Royal Highness General Khaled Bin Sultan Bin Abdel Aziz Al Saud, thrives in the atmosphere of competition, tightly structured training, high technology, advanced strategic planning and geopolitical thinking engendered by America's and Britain's most advanced military training institutions.

Prince Khaled is a grandson of King Abdel Aziz Ibn Saud, founder of the modern Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Prince Khaled's uncle is King Fahd Bin Abdel Aziz Al Saud, who also is prime minister of Saudi Arabia. His father is Prince Sultan Bin Abdel Aziz Al Saud, Saudi second deputy prime minister and minister of defense and aviation and second in line (after Crown Prince Abdullah Bin Abdel Aziz Al Saud, deputy prime minister of Saudi Arabia ) to succeed King Fahd to the Saudi throne. Both Prince Khaled and his slightly younger half brother, Prince Bandar Bin Sultan Al Saud, once a jet fighter pilot and now Saudi ambassador to the U.S., have been troubleshooters for the Saudi defense establishment since the early 1980s.

Clearly, therefore, the remarkable author of this remarkable book, who so enjoyed the competitive atmosphere of Western military service schools, also functions effectively in the tightly knit inner circles of the Al Saud family that has ruled part and now all of Saudi Arabia for some 300 years.

This 5,000-member family's significance in contemporary world history is pointed up by three basic facts: Saudi Arabia is the birthplace and now the spiritual center of Islam, the world's fastest-growing religion, presently embraced by one-fifth of humanity. Saudi Arabia has evolved since the mid-1970s into the political and financial powerhouse of the 22-nation League of Arab States. As a result, Saudi Arabia has become the single most important player in the strategically situated swath of Islamic states that forms an almost continuous belt from Morocco on the Atlantic shores of Africa across the Middle East and Asia to the Pacific shores of Indonesia.

These facts alone would make Prince Khaled's book important. But there are other compelling factors as well. It is the first book of any description published by a member of the Saudi royal family. Therefore the pre-publication manuscript of this precedent-shattering work was discussed, pondered and painstakingly fact-checked for almost two years by that family's inner circle. What emerged, after more than a year of such intensive discussions, is an authoritative and comprehensive glimpse at how the Al Saud family governs Saudi Arabia, and at some of its key decisions of the past 20 years. The book also provides a first-hand account of how Saudi Arabia's young princes are educated in a royal school for members of the Al Saud family, the children of other leading families in the Kingdom and, surprisingly for Western readers, the children of servants and retainers to the royal family.

One of Prince Khaled's closet companions at the royal school was Nader, the son of an African-descended maid of Prince Khaled's mother who served as nanny to young Khaled, his brother and his sister. Nader even enrolled with Prince Khaled at a preparatory course for Sandhurst until an attack of tuberculosis, brought on by the cold English climate and damp British barracks, forced Khaled's young companion to drop out and return to the milder climate of Saudi Arabia.

The second part of this remarkable book, which 47-year-old Prince Khaled declines to call an "autobiography" because "I'm still too young to write one," details his life as a junior and then mid-level Saudi military officer. This was a period which began with service in the field with air defense troops, progressed through complex negotiations with the manufacturers of U.S and other air defense missiles, and ended with three years of immersion in military training programs in the United States and elsewhere which he attended partly because his mastery of English and firm grounding in military science enabled him to evaluate their value for future generations of Saudi officers. Although he came to feel equally at home in both U.S.and Saudi military circles, he writes poignantly that the high point of his life was his first military command in an isolated region of northern Saudi Arabia. There, during a two-year assignment as commander of an air defense battery, he evolved his personal style of leading by example, strictly observing military and maintenance schedules and routines, and paying meticulous attention to the welfare of the men under his command.

This portion of the book also provides a revealing look at the lengthy, multifaceted and exceedingly complex historic relationship between Saudi Arabia and the United States. The founder of the modern Kingdom, King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, made a deliberate decision to look primarily to the United States, rather than Britain which had its own sphere of influence in nearby Palestine, Jordan and Iraq, for geological exploration in the 1930s and the development of Saudi petroleum reserves, the largest in the world, in the 1940s.

King Abdul Aziz's successors followed suit, sending to U.S. universities an entire generation of Saudi Arabia's best-qualified students in the 1960s and 1970s, and following American models in setting up Saudi Arabia's own impressive network of higher educational institutions in the 1980s. This direct cooperation also applied to Saudi ground-to-air defenses, which were so important to protect the country's vital oil fields.

These air defenses eventually were placed under Prince Khaled's command. His successful efforts, even before he became commander, to create a separate air defense branch, in addition to the Saudi air, naval and ground forces, provides a revealing look into how major decisions are reached within the Saudi royal family, which in matters related to national defense is largely synonymous with the Saudi government.

Such decisions are not made suddenly or on royal whim. Instead, they are the subject of extensive discussion, not just within ministries or in cabinet meetings but among broad overlapping networks within "the Family" and the government. Only after a clear consensus emerges is a royal edict issued. The process, time-consuming and exacting, is trying both for Saudi allies and for Western suppliers of technology and hardware. But it has worked very well, eliminating second-guessing and inconsistency once the long-awaited decision is announced.

As Prince Khaled's book reveals, however, there is an alternative procedure where, when a decision must be made in a hurry, the responsible member of the government takes the steps he deems necessary, and then waits anxiously for vindication from the consensus procedure. As his book reveals, Prince Khaled has found himself in both positions, sometimes waiting for an agonizing period for authorization to take steps he was convinced were needed, at other times forced to choose a course and then wait uncertainly for vindication by consensus. His success in advocating policies that others eventually realized were sound certainly was a factor in his steady advancement to ever-higher levels of responsibility.

Prince Khaled was fully engaged during much of the 1980s supervising the installation by American contractors of his country's extensive system of defensive ground-to-air missiles. However, during this period Saudi military planners became convinced that, because of Israeli influence over U.S. strategic planning, their country could not expect similar U.S. cooperation in procurement of weapons that had offensive capabilities. These included fighter-bombers and ballistic missiles the Saudis felt they needed to neutralize military or political blackmail with the threat of retaliatory attacks against unfriendly regional powers which included, in addition to Israel, Iran, Iraq, Sudan and even Libya.

The book contains a fascinating account of how Prince Khaled and his brother, Saudi Ambassador to the U.S. Prince Bandar, collaborated in a secret Saudi government initiative to procure the Chinese DF-3A missile, which the Saudis named Al Saqr (the Falcon). They carefully alternated their visits, in disguise, to China, taking elaborate precautions against satellite surveillance, and concealing the presence of Chinese technicians in Saudi Arabia despite the simultaneous presence in their country of perhaps 60,000 American businessmen, technicians and their families.

Finally the two sons of Saudi Arabia's defense minister were able to present Western intelligence services with a fait accompli. In 1988 the world learned that Saudi Arabia had installed medium-range surface-to-surface missiles capable of retaliating against the capitals of any of the regional powers Saudi Arabia considered potential threats to its oilfields or to its political stability.

In retrospect, such experiences, along with his years of close and friendly cooperation with U.S. military officers, supplemented by frequent negotiations with U.S. defense contractors, ideally suited Prince Khaled for the role of parallel commander (with U.S. Lt. Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf) of the coalition forces which, under a United Nations mandate, conducted one of the shortest and most successful major wars in history.

The final third of Prince Khaled's book is devoted to a detailed explanation of how that war was fought. American and Middle Eastern readers alike will be fascinated at this insider's account of how perhaps the proudest nation in the world, which nevertheless had a combined national and expatriate population of fewer than 18 million, coped with an influx of military and medical forces from 37 countries, led by half a million Americans.

Iraq and its open or secret sympathizers among Middle Eastern, African and Asian governments insisted that the influx would desecrate sacred Saudi soil. Leftist media critics of the traditional Arab states of the Gulf watched for the slightest sign of religious or gender discrimination against foreign forces by Saudi authorities.

As the buildup on Saudi soil for the liberation of Kuwait continued, crises that arose included attempts by Western governments to bring in female singers to entertain their troops (which would have inflamed conservative Islamic religious sensibilities), the initial unwillingness of France to send its aircraft and troops into Iraq, and the unhappiness of Syrian commanders at serving near U.S. units, which they suspected would eavesdrop on their communications and spy on their command and control procedures.

General Khaled dealt with all of these diplomatic problems in lengthy and, with one exception, friendly meetings with his American counterpart, General Schwarzkopf. At the same time he quietly dealt unilaterally with such problems as the early arrival of troops from some poor but supportive Islamic nations without arms, transport or even tents, supplies or ammunition of their own. None of these real problems surfaced either in the local or international press.

What appeared instead was testimony to the effectiveness of the diplomatic efforts that accompanied the successful military campaign. While U.S., British, French and other Western troops spearheaded a flanking movement through Iraq that cut off the occupying army from its supply lines, Kuwaiti, Saudi and other Gulf Cooperation Council troops led the direct assault through Iraqi minefields that cleared the way into Kuwait City as U.S. Marines stormed the airport.

When the war was over, Muslim troops were able to make pilgrimage visits to the Islamic shrines of Mecca and Medina before returning home; and troops from non-Islamic nations had at least a brief look at the modern cities of Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province or its capital, Riyadh, all far from the Islamic holy places.

As a man equally at home in East or West, Prince Khaled breaks the Arab tradition of reticence concerning personal affairs with poignant accounts of the death from illness of his first-born child, his first unhappy marriage to a cousin, his successful second marriage, and his joy in all of his seven children by both marriages. Not surprising to those familiar with family-oriented Saudi life, but an eye-opener to others will be the discovery that, to this day, Prince Khaled and his siblings routinely have lunch, whenever possible, with their mother in her palace.

Anyone who watched television during the Gulf war will recall, the moment they pick up Desert Warrior with Prince Khaled's photograph in summer uniform on its cover, how frequently they saw bits and pieces of his media briefings during the five-month "Desert Shield" buildup in Saudi Arabia of coalition forces and the six-week "Desert Storm" operation to liberate Kuwait. Those personal briefings, supplementing the military spokesmen at key times, were memorable in introducing to international audiences on a regular basis a member of the Saudi royal family who was fluent in English.

Now Prince Khaled's book breaks new ground as the first published view of the Gulf war by an Arab commander. Readers familiar with published accounts of the war by the U.S., British and French commanders involved will marvel again at the Saudi commander's diplomatic skill. Clearly torn between conflicting advice from Western friends of the Arabs to set the record straight, and recommendations from his ever-diplomatic countrymen to ignore accounts that overlook the immensity of the Saudi contribution, Prince Khaled, truly a man of both worlds, strikes a balance. He recounts events as he witnessed them, occasionally permitting himself an aside to the effect that he wishes his Western colleagues had paid a little more attention to giving recognition where it is due, but leaves it to the historians to assess credit for the major triumphs and blame for the minor failures of the Gulf War and its aftermath.

That his Western colleagues appreciate his fairness was attested by the attendence at a May 24 book-launching reception at United