I concur. My goodness, the people you meet on the Straight Dope Message Board!
Thanks but no. My problem is similiar to others with access to “Classified” and “Sensitive” information. It could be a nuclear warhead question, just a dumb small arms bullet, or a design inquiry that would step over the line. We sign reams of memorandums which are in actuality threats to our livelyhood, freedom, and loss of first-born-child. It’s serious and I take it that way. The information may be in the public domain but that’s not a defense. We’ve promised “not to disclose”. The big guy doesn’t care. I see all types of information that’s proprietary, For Official Use Only, not for foreign distribution that’s not classified but I can’t talk about.
I’d phrase it with a very slight and subtle difference; the Egyptians were unwilling to attempt to exploit the initial victory for the well-founded fear that they would be unable to. After crossing on the 6th and establishing a bridgehead they stopped and dug in, they made no effort to breakout until the 14th. The failed offensive on the 14th was launched due to Israeli success on the Syrian front where the Syrians had been stopped and then thrown onto the defensive, losing a great deal of ground to Israeli forces. Militarily Egypt had to act to relieve the pressure on Syria; politically Egypt had to act as being seen sitting on their hands while Syria collapsed wasn’t an acceptable option.
Attempting to push into the Sinai meant two serious disadvantages to Egypt both of which were apparent when they tried on the 14th. One was it meant leaving the range of the umbrella of fixed SAM sites, the other that it meant conducting fluid, mobile operations. This was something that Israel was clearly much better at as amply demonstrated by the defeat of the Egyptian offensive on the 14th and the quick and devastating riposte they were able to deliver crossing the Suez themselves and pinning the Egyptian 3rd Army surrounded against the canal.
Those were the days when a major power and a client state could get shit done.
Damn. I hope none of the (truly fascinating) information you’ve shared in this thread counts as “Classified” and/or “Sensitive”!
By the way, is it wrong of me to assume that Iranians would probably take better care of their equipment than would the Arab and South Asian folks you’ve encountered?
From Shazlys memoirs the Egyptians did indeed have some local successes outside the umbrella before the attack of the 14th, which probably left them over confident.
Its an excellent and informative post. But the doper in me will note that except for Pakistan, he has not met any South Asian folks from the countries he has mentioned. South Asia=the Sub Continent and Maldievs.
If you replace “tanks” with “horse cavalry”, the same has been true since at least the widespread adoption of the flintlock bayonet musket. Cavalry had a multi-century period of decline and had to wait for the internal combustion engine to make a comeback.
I don’t know how effective cavalry was against infantry during Antiquity. Cavalry seemed to have a quite ancillary role in the Roman and Greek militaries, I don’t know about others.
Not in the Roman Military starting from the late Republic. At Alesia it was the Cavalry which won the day and after their first encounters with the Persians, the Romans increased the use of their cavalry arm greatly. AT least for their armies on the Euphrates and the Limes Arabicus.
I understand.
How about an “an interesting fellow rambles on about stuff, which you are not allowed to ask questions about” thread?
While I don’t know much about the situation, I wonder if - at least to some degree-- the rulers on both sides didn’t find the war so convenient that they didn’t really want to decisively end it. Nothing better for a dictator than to find an outside enemy to focus the population’s blame and hatred on. If it’s an enemy that’s actually shooting, all the better. I mean, I’m sure Hussein knew how hard it was ruling Iraq; why would he want to have to rule Iran as well?
I hadn’t thought about the internal politics aspect of it. Both governments had come into power in 1979 and the war started in 1980. It must have been very useful in establishing the leaders of the two countries.
I think Saddam’s plan was to either grab Khuzestan and that Iran would let it go or to grab Khuzestan, topple the leaders and have it replaced with another.
Absolutely. I agree entirely with your account of the events. However, in my mind the Egyptian plan was inadequate exactly because it made no sensible provision for a strategic midgame, let alone an endgame. It of necessity handed the initiative over to the Israelis, which enabled them to take full advantage of their central position - to take care of the Syrians first and then commit full weight against the Egyptians.
Now it could well be that the Egyptians could have done no better with what they had. In that case, the better option would have been not to attack. At least, from a military POV.
It has always been true. Cavalry rarely if ever was able to successfully charge directly at well-disciplined and well-prepared infantry on their own, from the ancient world on down. Rather, good generals used cavalry as part of an all-arms team.
The exeptions to this were two-fold: (1) where the infantry was ill-disciplined or ill-led, cavalry could generally beat it head on - hence the preponderance of cavalry in the medieval world, which lacked well-led regular foot soldiers (at least, until the 100 years war); and (2) cavalry used in the steppe nomad style - to rain arrows from clouds of light horse archers that did not close until the enemy was fatally weakened.
Had Saddam never attacked, I suppose it’s possible that Iran could have been thrown into a civil war between the IRP and the MEK.
Not that they settled their differences when Saddam attacked, á la Mao ‘n’ Chiang Kai-shek: MEK’s terror campaign against the IRP only really got started in 1981, i.e. well after the war broke out. They bombed the IRP’s headquarters in June of 1981, killing the IRP’s secretary-general, who was also the country’s chief justice, plus no less than four ministers, and seventy others. Two months later, they killed both the country’s president and its prime minister, who was also the foreign minister – and so on and so forth.
Saddam thought “hey, you guys are cool!”, and invited them over for tea and military training and shelter and such. The MEK accepted Saddam’s offer, which, uh, shall we say, was a bit much for even the most mullah-sceptic Iranians – you can’t just start hanging out with the guy who just tried invading your country – and so this is the reason why practically all Iranians inside Iran, no matter what they think about Khomeini and the mullahs, still hate the MEK to this very day.
A lot of this has been answered in part, but some relevant factors:
a.) The Iraqi military plan scarcely merited the name. Saddam Hussein and his advisers were blinded by illusory strategic goals and imagined intelligence ( the Iraqi intelligence agency was highly politicized and utterly lacking in anything other than compromised human intelligence ). There seems to have been some notion that revolutionary Iran was so internally confused that it would collapse like an empty paper bag. There was apparently a strong belief/hope that Khuzestani Arabs would rise in support of the Iraqi assault. Neither of these things happened and the Iraqi command was left blinking stupidly as they slowly ( far too slowly ) began to realize they had bitten off more than they could chew.
b.) Related to the above, initial Iraqi strategic planning and tactics were for shit. Just as an example armor advanced unsupported or poorly supported by infantry and once they became bogged down in urban warfare they found themselves in a world of hurt trying to deal with Iranian regular infantry and Pasdaran. Iranian infantry actually proved fairly consistently superior to Iraqi infantry in basic skills, inferiority in firepower aside. The Iraqi army simply wasn’t all that good at waging conventional war, especially in terms of offensive actions and it showed. It would slowly get better in limited ways once forced back onto the defensive and tempered by getting beat upon for eight years, but early on it was a mess.
c.) For all the damage done of the 1979 Revolution the pre-war Iranian army had been better and more professional than Iraq’s ( albeit also more dependent on foreign maintenance ) and the remaining regular cadres proved instrumental in blunting and then pushing back the initial Iraqi assault. It’s capability slowly and steadily eroded thereafter for various reasons including ongoing political meddling and lack of resupply ( to be replaced with more and more revolutionary light infantry ), but in the first couple of years they made a significant difference.
d.) Iran had strategic depth ( and Iraq did not, do to the forward position of its vital oilfields ) and could afford to let Iraq flounder ahead and outrun their ( crap ) logistics chain. Iran had better morale at least among the revolutionary forces. Both sides also had internal security issues, but Iraq’s were more severe.
Iran did lose in the end - sheer firepower and better supply, slightly improving quality of Iraqi professionalism and Iran’s own ideological blinders which helped hinder their military efforts in the long run ensured that. But it was a hollow victory for Iraq ( they just survived ) and qualified defeat for Iran ( they survived ). All in all a spectacularly futile war.
Why is it that cavalry (horse or tank) has so seldom been able to defeat well-disciplined and well-prepared infantry on their own?
Why was infantry of such low quality during the Middle Ages?
What were Iron’s ideological blinders? Obviously, Shia Islam is at least one. How did it affect the war aside from making enemies of Sunni Gulf States by demading theor overthrow?
Were there other ideological blinders?
I just watched a show about this, the beginning of the war. The Iranian Air Force were about to start a Coup d Etat and were caught before it began, Saddam saw his moment and attacked thinking that there would be no Iranian AF. The pilots were taken out of their cells and straight to their planes, they fought well. Saddam forgot about National pride, the Iranian Arabs he thought would join him did not either.
Capt
Aside from steppe nomad tactics …
For cavalry at least, the primary impact on the battlefield was two-fold: to use their higher manouverability outflank the enemy; and to overwhelm the enemy using shock tactics. [They are also obviously of use off the battlefeld for many functions - scouting, interdicting the enemy’s scouts, and harrassing/destroying a defeated enemy in retreat]
The former typically requires that the enemy be pinned in place somehow - that is usually the job for infantry. The latter requires that the enemy be susecptible to being stampeded by panic. Well-disciplined and trained infantry are less likely to do so.
That in turn is predicated on the fact that it is nearly impossible to get horses to actually charge home into formed infantry. The rider may be willing to impale himself on an unwavering line of spears, but usually the horse has other ideas. Think also of the physics of the matter - a charging line of horses is going to be packed together much less tightly than the defending infantry. Each horse must face say 4-8 infantry soldiers, each holding a weapon.
So if the infantry stands, a charge is unlikely to break them and will typically end badly. However, a charging line of horsemen is very damn frightening. If some of the infantry run, opening a gap, the horsemen can break through the gap and start killing infantry from behind. So only disciplned and trained infantry who know better than to run and can trust that their comrades will also not run can withstand a charge like that.
Once the infantry starts to run it is doomed if it can’t run quickly to some sort of shelter. A guy on horseback can kill any number of running infantry with relative ease and safety. A heavily-laden infantryman cannot outrun a guy on horseback.
Tanks are roughly analogous. Infantry weapons or artillery typically could take out tanks. But if they are no good if the infantry runs. If some infantry run, leaving a gap, the tanks can break through and start to outflank and surround the remaining infantry. Green or ill-led infantry are likely to be stampeded by the threat of being overrun or cut off by tanks.
There are lots of reasons for this. As a generality, armies were not composed of trained and disciplined soldiers, but were made up of the followers of various feudal nobles. They may have fought well as individual duelists, but they were not well trained in what we would regard as tactics. The social position of the infantry was low, as nobility was associated with cavalry. So the infantry tended to be composed of low-class persons who were conscripted by their social superiors (all cavalry).
People who figured out that disciplined infantry can beat cavalry eventually broke the dominance of cavalry, and this happened well before gunpowder weapons became significant. One famous example of this is the Swiss pikemen.
Malthus,
Thanks for the informative answer. Any idea why the infantry square was effective against cavalry? Is there something special about that shape? Couldn’t they just have a non-hollow shape?
“Aside from steppe nomad tactics …”
How are those countered? Didn’t the Romans and later the Crusaders have a bit of trouble with those?
Well the uncompromising extremist political stance that won them no sympathy internationally didn’t help. This despite unequivocally being the victim of an essentially unprovoked invasion - the difference between their situation and Kuwait’s in the first Gulf War in that respect was really pretty much nil. Of course Iran’s rulers were part of an extreme ideological regime trying to export religious revolution whereas the Kuwaitis were just jerkish plutocrats. But Iran hadn’t had time to start agitating seriously in Iraq before SH came barreling over the border. SH had a flimsy casus belli, just as in the Kuwait case, but flimsy is flimsy.
But in operational terms, the Iranian theocrats took the wrong lesson from the early success in throwing the Iraqis back. Ignoring or minimizing the impact of the skeleton regular army and noting that Iraq, as above, had a lot of trouble dealing with light infantry in built up areas due to their own operational deficiencies, they decided that revolutionary elan was THE key. So the move, partially pushed by lack of supply of course, to shift to temporarily mobilized revolutionary light infantry to take on the bulk of the fighting. Hence the WW I tactics and the use of religiously indoctrinated of suicide attackers ( arguably the primary ideological origin of the religious suicide bomber in the ME/NA via export first to the Lebanese Hezbollah, then ramifying from there - we maybe can blame that one in part on Saddam Hussein as well ). The abandonment of sound military tactics and properly trained and professional regulars in favor of mass assault by irregulars in the end just led to the eventual exhaustion of the Iranian state.