"As real as that problem is, that is not your concern."
Impatient, Dixon asked, "Exactly, sir, what are my concerns and duties?"
Leaning forward and folding his hands on the desk, Wilford delineated in detail Dixon's duties and responsibilities. As the chief of staff for the 2nd Corps (Forward), Dixon's responsibilities were diverse. For the most part he would be a planner, working on contingency plans, training exercises, and coordinating future operations in Egypt. His other major area of responsibility would be as liaison with the Egyptian army units that would operate with American units during training exercises and, if necessary, at war.
His role concerning the prepositioned equipment, as Wilford explained, was minimal. For this Dixon was thankful. His primary task was to ensure that the plans his people developed matched what was available on the ground in storage. When it didn't, Dixon's small staff had to inform deploying units of what equipment they needed to bring to supplement the prepositioned stores. The development and implementation of a program of routine maintenance and services on the equipment in storage was not his duty. An Ordnance Corps lieutenant colonel was charged with that.
Even in storage, checks and services must be performed on the equipment. The 1973 Arab-Israeli war provided a bitter lesson in this. Equipment stored in Europe for U.S. forces had been taken out of storage and flown to Israel after staggering losses by the Israeli Defense Force. Unfortunately, some of the equipment had not been properly maintained. The recoil systems of self-propelled howitzers, for example, had not been exercised, on a routine basis, and thus dry rot had been allowed to eat the seals. When the Israelis received the equipment, they sent it right into battle, only to have many guns blow out their seals after just a few rounds. It was therefore crucial that there be a system that kept the equipment ready and serviceable.
To operate the equipment storage sites, both U.S. military and Egyptian nationals were used. They secured the equipment, performed maintenance on it, and, when the time came, issued it to a unit deploying. Very few of the personnel were American. Each storage site, containing a brigade's worth of equipment, was commanded by a captain. He was assisted by four or five NCOs and a like number of enlisted personnel. The rest of his people were Egyptian under contract to the U.S. Government. A massive training program had been set up to train Egyptians in the proper care and maintenance of every type of equipment that a U.S. division processed.
In addition to the equipment storage sites, there was the need for the establishment and security of an ammo storage point, or ASP. The first shipments of ammunition were just beginning to arrive in country. The goal of the U.S. Army was to have thirty days of ammunition on hand for a reinforced division. This goal, as Colonel Wilford pointed out, would not be realized for several years. Budget cuts had slowed that program. For now, the Army had to content itself with two weeks' worth of ammunition in country, with contingency plans for emergency airlift of critical items if that became necessary.
There was a pause. Wilford hit the intercom. When the sergeant answered, Wilford merely told her to bring the Twilight and Pegasus files in. While they waited, neither he nor Dixon said anything. Though he had no idea what Pegasus was, Dixon felt a surge of excitement. He was finally going to get an opportunity to find out what the man he was replacing had been doing when he had been killed.
The sergeant gave him two thin folders. The Twilight folder was covered front and back with bright yellow-and-white Top Secret labels. The Pegasus folder was only Secret and therefore had red-and-white Secret labels. Each folder contained a summary of an operation in which Dixon would play a part. As he read each summary, his heart sank. Far from being a low-keyed and laid-back job, his new position put him in a virtual hot seat.
Twilight was the name given to covert Special Forces operations in Sudan and Ethiopia. A number of SF teams, operating out of central Sudan, were assisting both Sudanese government forces and Ethiopian guerrillas against Soviet-backed forces. At the time that the summary was written, there were twelve such teams in the field. Dixon's task would be to plan and coordinate their activities with the Air Force and Navy and to coordinate the resupply of team members and the evacuation, when necessary, of the wounded among them. His code name when operating under Twilight was Cardinal, the same code name Lieutenant Colonel Dedinger had been using when he died earlier that month.
As surprising as Twilight was, Pegasus was more so. For years the Army had conducted readiness exercises designed to test its ability to move troops from the continental United States to reinforce forces overseas or to potential trouble spots. ReForger (short for "redeployment of forces to Germany") for Europe, Team Spirit for Korea, and Bright Star for the Middle East were the oldest and best known. These were good exercises, but one of the chief criticisms of them was that they were planned and coordinated months in advance. Congressional critics charged that in a true "bolt out of the blue" scenario, U.S. forces couldn't respond in time. The war in Iran had come close to proving them right. One of the lessons the Army had walked away with was the need to improve the speed with which various units tagged with overseas contingency plans could deploy with no notice. Thus, Pegasus had been developed.
The concept was simple. Rather than stage elaborate, well-prepared-and-planned readiness exercises, units would be alerted with little or no notice for deployment. Pegasus was, in effect, a massive test to determine if the Armed Forces could meet their worldwide commitments. From the beginning, it was a controversial plan. Many in the Army felt that it would not be a true test, arguing that in the real world tensions would build up, allowing time to accomplish last-minute planning, mobilization, and deployment. One of the sharpest congressional critics, Congressman Ed Lewis of Tennessee, listened to those arguments, then simply asked, "Well, then, what about Korea, Grenada, and Iran? How much time did you have before you had to respond to them?" In the end, Congress drove its point home, stating that unless the military clearly demonstrated its ability to deploy in a timely manner, funds for more sea and airlift assets would be cut off.
Then there was the matter of the Helsinki Accord, which required signatories to notify each other before conducting major military exercises. Meant as a means of preventing misunderstandings or tension when a potential enemy moved forces in preparation for a training exercise, the accord had been used selectively after the war in Iran. It had not been renounced by either the United States or the Soviet Union and was technically still binding. Both the United States and the Soviet Union used various means to sidestep the problem. The United States claimed that forces already in a theater did not count against the total until all forces were brought together, allowing it to initiate notification and initial movement within the period required for notification. In addition, Army and Marine divisions deployed with most, but not all, of their assigned brigades or battalions, bringing the total strength as near as possible to the limits of the accord. The Soviets opted for another method. They simply ran several small exercises in close proximity of each other, in both time and space, with the total personnel in any one exercise never exceeding that specified in the accord.
Under pressure from Congress, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff directed that selected Army, Navy, and Air Force units would participate in no-notice deployment exercises, code named Pegasus. Those exercises, based on real-world contingency plans, such as Re-Forger, would commence with no advance warning to the units participating. Only those people who needed to coordinate with the host nation where the training would take place would know in advance. The Pegasus folder that Dixon was reading contained the concept of operation for the first Pegasus exercise to be held. The exercise was to be part of the Bright Star series, with a start date of 29 November, fourteen days hence.