> Behalf Of Doug Pensinger
>
>> More than 50,000 casualties in less than 100 hours, 500/hr,
>> zoiks. And what,
>> less than 1-200 of our own? Some significant percentage of which
>> were killed
>> or wounded by friendly fire? Sounds more like the Ravens vs the
>> Pop Warner*
>> rejects. This was an Iraqi army of what - 1/2 million under arms, many
of
>> which were battle tested vets? Amazing.
Brett Coster said this:
>Many of the frontline Iraqi troops were conscripted militia rather than
the
>elite Republican Guards etc. It's rarely ever a good military strategy to
>have your best troops in the very front line when facing a massive attack.
>You keep your best to plug any gaps that occur, or to counterattack.
True, but the battles north of Basra were largely against Republican Guard
forces, and they didn't do any better. It just didn't matter.
>As for allied casualties, in total I think they were less than 100. The
>Brits lost about 12, almost all through (US) friendly fire. Recognition
>procedures never have seemed to be a US strongpoint (let me tell you one
day
>about why Australian aircraft had to delete all red paint during 1942).
There were two major problems in the Gulf with regards to friendly fire.
The first was that the range at which weapons could engage exceeded the
range at which we could identify targets with a high degree of reliability
- not a problem in Central Europe, where the number of Soviet tanks was
expected to be so overwhelming that see it - shoot it was a good strategy,
but more of a concern in the Gulf. The second was that since Iraqi forces
basically lacked any meaningful capacity to hurt Allied forces, it was
ineitable that a large proportion of Allied casualties would be inflicted
by friendly fire.
>Also, there was no pulling of punches by the allied forces at all, as
>evidenced by the absolute carnage along the road from Kuwait City back to
>Iraq. Virtually a repeat of the Falaise Gap slaughter during the breakout
>from Normandy in 1944, or Stalingrad if you prefer. Continuous
annihilating
>air attack on an enemy trapped with nowhere else to go and virtually no
way
>of hitting back. But then again, the allied forces probably weren't geared
>up to deal with hundreds of thousands of prisoners. And noone could have
>assumed that the ground war would be over in just 100 hours.
This I think is not fair, as you seem to be implying here that Allied
forces were killing people on the point of surrender. Such is not the
case. In fact, during the initial surrender negotiations Norman
Schwarzkopf told the Iraqi generals that he had _60,000_ Iraqi prisoners to
repatriate to them, and this was probably a huge underestimate. Second,
the so-called Highway of Death to which you are referring - well, very few
people actually died there. The column was made up of Iraqi forces
escaping in looted vehicles from Kuwait. American planes then nailed the
head and the tail of the column, and the Iraqi soldiers in it fled into the
desert - at which point the planes returned and smashed the vehicles.
People who actually went there all reported that there were very few
bodies. I'm not denying that the warfare was of phenomenally high
intensity - indeed, it was _supposed_ to be. But it's not as if the Allied
forces were refusing to take prisoners either - in fact, their human rights
record was exempl
ary.
>Brett
Gautam
