PROFILE: With a US war against Iraq now seen as inevitable, it will fall on General Tommy Franks to lead America's biggest military campaign in a decade. Behind the media-shy facade, though, is a tough, opinionated leader, writes Conor O'Clery, North America Editor.
The first thing to be said about General Thomas (Tommy) Franks is that he is no Norman Schwarzkopf. Not for him the swashbuckling style of "Stormin' Norman", the burly, bellowing Commander-in-Chief of the United States Central Command who led US and allied forces in the Persian Gulf during the 1991 Gulf War, in between giving press conferences.
The American general from Oklahoma who will lead a modern assault on Iraq if war comes next year is a lean, "mud-on-the-boots" soldier who shuns publicity and almost never gives interviews.
When Tommy Franks does encounter the media he is a model of no-comment. Here, for example, is what he said when asked by a US television crew about the progress of operation "Enduring Freedom" in Afghanistan.
"The operations that we undertake go on 24 hours a day," he said. "They go on from the air, they go on day, they go on night and as you have seen I think in some of the media we have had elements on the ground in Afghanistan. The efforts that we're about with regard to what we're after for this objective are going very, very well, and I'll leave it at that at this point."
Given to dense military jargon and acronyms, Tommy Franks has said little in public about himself or his ideas on military tactics and theory. He has not given any interviews on his experiences since joining the army from college and rising rapidly through the ranks, gaining degrees in business administration from the University of Texas and the Army War College in Pennsylvania, or about the decorations he earned in different military theatres around the world, including Vietnam and the Gulf.
The 54-year-old, four-star general, who today is commander-in-chief of US Central Command, which controls US military operations in 25 nations in Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East, including Afghanistan, is not so introverted or tongue-tied behind barracks doors. Officers who have served with Franks call him blunt to the point of overbearing.
"Tommy is not quiet about anything," said retired Major General Leo Baxter, an artillery man who has known Franks for 25 years. He is "very outgoing, very opinionated," he told the Associated Press. "He's not a guy who flies off the handle, but in the course of a five-minute discussion about how you're wrong and he's right, he'll use words that are and aren't in the dictionary."
Another fellow serviceman said: "He turns officers on because he gets at the guts of the profession." General Franks is known nevertheless as a soldier's soldier and is said to appreciate the value of keeping up spirits for troops far from home. On November 26th, for example, he led a troupe of entertainers including the honorary Green Beret, Wayne Newton, and a couple of Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders onto the USS Abraham Lincoln in the Gulf for a morale-boosting concert.
Since he took command of the Gulf and Middle East region, Franks has had to cope with the demands of the most powerful and domineering American Defence Secretary since Robert McNamara during the Vietnam War. Donald Rumsfeld has notoriously bad relations with the military brass in the Pentagon. Many believed he humiliated the army's top commander, General Eric Shinseki, by leaking premature news of his retirement. He is reputed to ignore crucial advice from four-star generals.
During the run-up to the war in Afghanistan, Franks was slow in preparing the "credible military options" that Rumsfeld demanded. Bob Woodward in Bush at War states that "privately Rumsfeld was furious and beating up on Franks incessantly".
Rumsfeld apparently saw Franks as leaden-footed and too conventional, lacking the mental agility to cope readily with unconventional ideas, though he called him in public "a wise and inspiring commander".
During the Afghanistan operation Rumsfeld was on the telephone every day to Franks. With Rumsfeld's direction and Franks's command the operation combined special forces adventurism, CIA bribery, air strikes and conventional military tactics. It worked but with some notable failures.
Franks allowed the Tora Bora operation to be placed in the hands of local Afghan commanders to minimise American casualties (some of which in the end came from friendly fire), and Osama bin Laden, if he was there, got away.
For a media-shy general, Franks is not averse to staging a "successful" operation for the benefit of the cameras. When US Rangers parachuted onto an airfield in the Taliban stronghold of southern Afghanistan, Franks reportedly made sure it had been abandoned first.
Initially Rumsfeld wanted to limit the Iraq strike force to 75,000 troops, which prompted the Pentagon top brass to worry that he would accept unnecessary risk. Franks will in fact lead a force of more than twice that number.
In his preparations for war with Iraq, General Franks is preaching the dictum that "no plan of battle survives contact with the enemy."
This was brought home to the Pentagon in the most embarrassing manner in a rehearsal for the second Gulf War called Millennium Challenge 2002.
The practice war was fought by US forces against a a rogue commander in a Middle Eastern nation in possession of weapons of mass destruction, such as chemical and biological agents.
It was the largest-ever virtual battle conducted by US forces, and it was lost by the Americans. The Saddam figure, played by Marine General Paul Van Riper, sank 16 US-led ships using guerrilla tactics. Landing forces were repulsed and billion-pound spy satellites proved to be useless.
Indeed, if "Saddam" had not been barred from using chemical weapons there would have been a complete rout, and red-faced commanders had to "refloat" the vessels to ensure a victory.
In recent months Franks has moved much of his headquarters from MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida to the tiny Arab state of Qatar in preparation for conducting the biggest American war in a decade.
Recently he spent two days sitting from dawn to dusk in the centre of rows of 200 staff officers in an air-conditioned Qatar war room, playing another virtual war game called "Internal Look" on banks of computers and a 25-foot square battlefield screen.
American strategists predict another Gulf war will be short (assuming that the virtual lessons have been learned). Franks will run it under the direction of Rumsfeld and General Richard Meyers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
He is expected to use overwhelming air power and highly accurate satellite-guided munitions to soften up Saddam Hussein's forces before sending in forces across the border from Kuwait.
Assuming an American victory, General Franks is then tipped to replace Saddam Hussein as military governor of Iraq under US occupation.
While he is no Norman Schwarzkopf, Tommy Franks might in fact end up as a latter-day Douglas MacArthur, the American general who was given the task of running a shattered Japan after the second World War.