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Subject:Re: Landmines RE: US Foreign Policy Re: *DO* we share a
civilization?
Gautam wrote:
<<This is not true, I'm afraid. It is a very common misconception, but it
is not at all true. Although the air war was extremely effective at
certain tasks - severing logistical chains, weakening command and control,
and so on - even the Air Force has now come to admit that the Iraqi forces
were combat capable when the ground war began. In fact, the largest tank
battle since the Second World War was fought north of Basra. I actually
know people who were at 73 Easting, one of the most remarkable - and
intense - ground combat actions of which I am aware. It is still true that
the only thing that can kill a large number of main battle tanks quickly is
other
main battle tanks. The reason most people don't realize this about the
Gulf is that American land forces moved so quickly that press coverage was
unable to keep up with them - thus leaving the only lasting images those of
the air war. >>
I guess what I based my asumptions on was reports of Iraqi Tank squadrons
having been thouroughly shell shocked by the air war, and tanks that, while
they hadn't been destroyed, had been rendered inacsessable by being burried
in their hiding places.
Certianly the destruction of Iraqi infrastructure and complete air
superiority facilitated the rapid progress of the brief ground war. Would
you have an idea on what the casualties were in the abovementioned tank
battle?
Doug
Iraqi or American casualties? I'm not aware of any really reliable
estimates on Iraqi casualties in those battles (I'm sure they exist, I'm
just not aware of them) but most of the ones I've seen place the numbers in
the 50,000 range. That would probably be about half the casualties the
Iraqis suffered during the war, and is probably an underestimate. American
casualties were extraordinarily low. Although some infantrymen and crew of
M-2 Bradleys were killed, only _1_ American tank crewman was killed during
the entire war - and he was an M-1A1 tank commander who was killed by
shrapnel from an enemy tank that his tank had destroyed. The superiority
of American to Iraqi ground forces was something like, oh, the Baltimore
Ravens against a middle-school football team. A Dartmouth political
scientist (I'm blanking on his name, I'm afraid) who did a study of the
land battles in the Gulf War had two main conclusions that stick in my
mind. The first was that the largest part of the actual destruction of the
Ira
qi army was done by American ground forces. The second was that if you
looked at the forces arrayed on either side before and after a battle - he
tracked 11 major ground engagements during the 100 hours of the ground war
- the only correlation was between the number of Iraqi soldiers involved
and the number of Iraqi casualties. The number of _American_ soldiers
involved in a battle, or the ratio of the two forces involved, had no
effect on the outcome of the battle. Rick Atkinson's superb book
_Crusade_, a history of the Gulf War, describes 73-Easting, in which a
single American tank company under the command of H.R. McMaster smashed an
entire Iraqi regiment in _minutes_ without taking a single casualty of
their own. It wasn't that the Iraqis weren't _trying_ to fight - they were
very brave, just about all accounts agree. It's just that they couldn't
see at night, their weapons weren't really capable of damaging M-1s, their
fire control couldn't even begin to engage at ranges that American tanks
could sc
ore first-round kills on the move, and their unit cohesion was vastly
inferior. They could _try_ all they wanted, they just couldn't do anything
about it. My current boss used to command that unit before the Gulf War,
in fact.
Gautam Mukunda
