Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, February 27, 1991 TAG: 9102270416
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MELISSA HEALY/ LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long
After months of allied concern over Iraq's battle-hardened million-man army, thousands of tanks and artillery pieces, chemical weapons and fearsome defenses, the attack against Iraqi forces by the 28-country U.N. coalition has turned into a full-fledged rout.
As of Tuesday night, more than 30,000 Iraqi troops had surrendered - virtually without incident - to U.S. and other coalition forces, some even trying to give themselves up to small teams of journalists who were advancing on Kuwait city.
"The Iraqi army is in full retreat," Gen. Thomas W. Kelly, director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said during a briefing Tuesday. "There are units that are still offering organized resistance, but they are being engaged and defeated as we get to them."
What happened to enable the allied forces to achieve such a sweeping victory?
Experts cite these developments:
> Although Iraq had amassed huge numbers of tanks and artillery, they were inadequate to compensate for Baghdad's glaring deficiency in aircraft, electronic warfare gear and other high-tech weaponry, which left Iraq without a complete weapons system with which to fight.
Shortcomings in Baghdad's war machine made the Iraqi army a hapless victim of its own vulnerabilities, enabling the allies to turn many of Iraq's initial strengths into major weaknesses.
For example, although Iraq had erected elaborate fortifications, they eventually became a prison for immobilized Iraqi combat vehicles, making them more vulnerable than ever to allied air attacks. Saddam's insistence that his army rely heavily on orders from central command became a formula for chaos when allied warplanes destroyed Iraqi communications centers. And Iraq virtually squandered its million-man army by sending raw recruits to lead the defense in this past week's ground war.
Eventually, the Iraqi soldiers, drained by weeks of bombing and psychological warfare, concluded that they could not handle allied ground forces with the easy brutality of their initial invasion of Kuwait.
The result has been what Anthony Cordesman, a Georgetown University professor and an expert on the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, calls a "catalytic collapse."
Although Cordesman contends that "no one could have predicted the shock impact of what happened to the Iraqis," he argues that "there's no great mystery here."
Cordesman cites "a vastly superior force in tactics, professionalism, training and equipment met a force that totally lacked initiative, had no way to recover itself and in every tactical area proved inferior."
James F. Dunnigan, author of "How to Make War," a primer on modern warfare, agrees that the key to the allies' success was their vastly superior resources.
"Victory almost always goes to the bigger battalions," Dunnigan said. "To put it another way, victory is a property of the wealthy. Battles may be won by a David, but the Goliaths win the wars."
In reality, however, the allied campaign has involved not just three days of ground-fighting, but more than 6 1/2 months of what U.S. Gen. Colin Powell outlined Feb. 7 as a seamless, unfolding plan of assaults from all quarters - "a single, integrated campaign."
The attack began early in August with more than six months of economic sanctions that deprived Iraq's war machine of the supplies and parts that it needed to maintain and equip its army.
Then came five weeks of furious allied air assaults, designed to wipe out Iraqi air defenses and pummel artillery and ground installations.
To Powell and other military commanders, the results of those preliminary campaigns - the signs of the Iraqi military's brittleness - were becoming clearly visible in early February.
Allied warplanes had achieved unchallenged control of the skies and chased the "flower of the Iraqi Air Force" - its MiG-25 fighters and F-1 Mirages - into Iran.
Unmolested, the warplanes were improving their ability to attack Iraq's dug-in military equipment, and the air war was on its way to claiming 100 Iraqi tanks - and at least as many artillery pieces and armored personnel carriers - per day.
By mid-February, Pentagon officials said, the Iraqi military appeared increasingly hollowed out. Feb. 19 - five days before the ground war began - Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of U.S. forces, said that the Iraqi military was "on the verge of collapse."
The gradual but steady collapse of the Iraqi regime was intentionally shrouded by the administration. For months, U.S. officials went to Capitol Hill to argue that sanctions and aerial bombardment themselves would not succeed in pushing Iraqi troops from Kuwait.
But their remonstrances belied the heavy impact that the sanctions - and later the air war - were having, particularly on the Iraqi military, which was deprived of food and necessary maintenance supplies, according to captured Iraqi soldiers.
By October, the sanctions had begun to deplete Iraq's supplies of tires and lubricants - both vital supplies for military machine.
By late January - less than two weeks after the air war had begun, the allies had sharply reduced Baghdad's ability to resupply its southern troops - by 90 percent in some cases. In many areas, such necessities virtually disappeared.
The combined effect of the sanctions and the bombardment forced the Iraqis to hold their tanks and armored vehicles unoiled and undriven in their berms and trenches - setting them up to rust until many were virtually useless as fighting machines.
Pentagon officials believe that by the time allied forces crossed the border into Iraq and Kuwait, a major portion of Iraq's estimated 2,600 tanks had either been destroyed by bombardment or immobilized by lack of maintenance.
"Most of them can't move," said a knowledgeable Pentagon planner the day the ground assault began. The soldiers inside, he said, were faced with only two choices: "They're going to either surrender or die in place."
The ferocity of the air war itself - and toll that it took on the Iraqi army - all but guaranteed that the Iraqi military would crumble under the further pressure of ground assaults, U.S. officials said.
Eighteen days into the air war, a senior Pentagon official said that the U.S. expected allied warplanes to destroy 50 percent of the Iraqi military's combat vehicles before recommending that a ground war be launched.
Feb. 24, when the ground war actually began, at least 38 percent of Iraq's tanks and 48 percent of its artillery pieces - the only measure in which the Iraqis had clear numerical superiority - had been put out of action.
But even such levels of destruction were more than the allies needed to force Iraqi units to the breaking point.
During the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, Iraq's Republican Guard routinely retreated from battle when only 20 percent to 30 percent of their combat power had been destroyed. And ordinary infantry units would seldom fight beyond the point at which 40 percent of their capability was gone.
But the relentless allied bombardment not only destroyed Iraq's equipment, it also produced a devastating psychological impact that destroyed the Iraqis' will to fight.
The return of the allied bombers night after night were a stark reminder to Iraqi troops that they had been left without air cover, without supply lines and unable even to get out of their trenches to bury their dead.
In the end, Bush administration officials say, Saddam himself delivered the final blow to his troops - by launching a flurry of diplomatic maneuverings in the weeks before the ground war was launched that further demoralized his troops.
Saddam's sudden peace bid Feb. 15 marked "a very significant break in their will to fight, one senior Pentagon official said. "It's going to collapse their morale - they're in effect being told they're not fighting for anything anymore."
by CNB