How were we able to defeat Iraq’s army so quickly? While there are some issues with the occupation (okay, understatement), the invasion went pretty well both in timeframe and casualties.
Why were we able to win so easily? Defeat the army, Republican Guard, Saddam, take Baghdad, etc? I can’t believe it was simply because the army headed for the hills to come back later as insurgents.
Uhhh, the American Military is the best in the World…Superior in everyway except maybe the everyday American foot soldier’s grasp of conversational Arabic.
The memory of Gulf War I had to have been foremost in the minds of the Iraqi Army’s commanders. The events leading up to the war were mostly political maneuvering: whether the US had the determination to go ahead, whether Saddam could stall or bluff, etc. But I doubt anyone had any serious doubts that the US would crush the Iraqi Army in any conventional fight.
Also, I’ve heard it suggested that the US secretly encouraged key Iraqi commanders to simply give up in exchange for favorable post-war treatment. Cite anyone?
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This thread is gonna be a tough one to keep on track. If you can answer the OP’s question in factual terms, without dragging in opinions and political comments, then do so.
If you can’t, either stay out or start your own thread in Great Debates or the Pit.
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Thanks, SamClem, I wanted to keep the focus on the invasion until the capture of Baghdad. Not on whether we should’ve attacked or how the occupation was going.
Just on why the war went so well. The tactics & strategy. How we got through Baghdad’s defenses so quickly. Why Baghdad (Basra, etc) didn’t turn into house to house fighting. Why the Republican Guard was so ineffective, etc. Why Saddam, etc didn’t throw their air force and tanks into a last-ditch defense.
Don’t forget ‘shock and awe’. The air force hit the Iraqis hard on all their command and control, communications, and headquarters areas, totally disconnecting the military units from the chain of command. They hit military targets so hard that it probably played havoc with morale. Get the enemy confused and hurting, and you’ve got a huge leg up.
The next step was the race to Baghdad - much faster than anyone thought was possible. The 4th ID actually outran their logistic tail and had to stop and wait for fuel and supplies.
But there’s another factor that should have been a big warning - when the U.S… entered Baghdad it encountered almost no resistance. At first, they decided to do some ‘spearhead’ manoevers with lightning runs into the city and back out, just to show the Iraqis that the U.S. could come and go at will. The U.S. military planned this as something of a propaganda move, but when the humvees went in they encountered no resistance, so they stayed. Everyone else moved in, and the war was over. This surprised me at the time - I thought a ‘fortress Baghdad’ was a real possibility, with the Iraqis hoping to inflict heavy casualties through brutal house to house fighting in the capital. But that didn’t happen.
So what happened? I think it’s clear now what happened - the Iraqi units most loyal to Saddam (the Fedayeen and Republican Guard) faded away, retaining as much strength as they could, and formed the core of the ‘insurgency’. My belief is that the insurgency was Saddam’s war-fighting plan from day one. Huge amounts of money were moved out of country, weapons were cached all over the place, Iraqi generals moved into Syria and are conducting the insurgency from there, etc.
In that sense, the war never ended. The insurgency is the ‘real’ war.
There have been extensive studies on this subject carried out by gen-u-ine military experts.
You can find a large collection of them here.
It’s a difficult thing to summarize, but our intelligence was much better, our high-tech arms meant that we hit what we shot at, and we moved faster than any other military offensive ever. That’s a pretty good recipe for battlefield success.
Give the man a cigar. As an example of the same thing, during the German Ardennes offensive in the winter of 1944-45 (Battle of the Bulge) two US infantry divisions were essentially overrun in a matter of hours. The veteran 28th Division managed to withdraw in some reasonable facsimile of order. The 106th Division, which had just arrived from the US into the line a couple of days before the attack disintegrated. Two regiments surrendered en masse and the other regiment broke up and the fragments were swept up by retreating US forces and “deployed to the rear.” Had the forces who took the first assault been the whole army and there not been other forces nearby to plug the gap the battle would have been over in just a couple of days.
The question has pretty much been answered, but I’d like to add a detail that’s interesting.
Basically, most “low-budget” armies learn to fight as they go and that’s always a recipe for getting your butt kicked. Places like Iraq, Pakistan, Turkey and even China have simple “point and shoot and march” type of training (if that) so their guys just can’t compete with highly trained personel. Their biggest mistake is holding down the trigger until they run out of ammo, as if they were Rambo. That may look cool, but you can empty an entire clip or belt without hitting anything. Worse yet, you might jam your gun or have the barrel warp and make it unusable.
Armies like in the US learn to use bullets sparingly. Instead of going BRATATA-TATATATATA-TATATATATATATA-TATATATATATA!!! for fifteen minutes like a tard, they’ll shoot two bullets, aim, shoot again. Two shots may not look like much, but if you pop them off at 4 second intervals your fire will be just as heavy but won’t use as much ammo. That way you don’t wind up in the ridiculous position of having to make a run for it.
Really? Are you sure about that?
I can understand the Turkish and Iraqi forces, but I always thought the Chinese and Pakistani militaries were highly trained outfits.
Well I was making a gross generalization, but most develloping countries have a lot of quickly trained soldiers to bolster their ranks and make themselves seem bigger as a fighting force. Remember that just like in any army in the world (including the US) not every, “class” of soldier is trained the same way. That’s why Navy SEALS are better trained than your weekend reserve soldier. Same thing in this case, only… you know, worse. Some places basically just give you a gun and uniform and explain that the guy yelling is the commanding officer.
Do you have some first-hand knowledge with Turkey’s military to group them in with those other countries? Since Turkey has been a NATO member for 53 years, I’d imagine that its military training and doctrine would generally meet Western, not Third World, standards.