I don’t know about now, but at the time, in the view of one Squadron Leader of my acquaintance who fought in GW1, the Saudi Air Force was mainly for show and the pilots were useless.
You’re assuming people were looking in the right places. It’s a huge border. And they most certainly had the logistic and military capability. To take Saudi, that is; but they didn’t have the capability to keep it.
Lacking another ready source, I’ll accept yours :). Mine probably reaches back to pre-war guesstimates ( perhaps Cordesman, though maybe not ). Still, I agree Iraq would have been unlikely to roll very far for the reasons you’ve stated.
We aren’t talking about hiding a single Scud launcher here, or even a small command post. We are talking about a very large amount of material which would need to be trucked in over months and then secured. Also, from memory the Iraqi’s pre-GW I basically didn’t have access to GPS type technology, and relied very heavily on road infrastructure for combat and logistics movements…so, assuming my memory hasn’t failed that means that you wouldn’t have to look everywhere, simply look in and around where the roads were. And the US was already doing that via satellite, let alone whatever the Saudi’s were using. Saddam wasn’t exactly a trusted neighbor even before he invaded Kuwait, after all.
And all this assumes the Iraqi’s could even do this stuff in the first place. I seriously doubt they had the logistics or even supply to BUILD the necessary facilities that would have allowed combat operations deep into Saudi Arabia, let alone build them in such a way that no one would be the wiser for it. But even pretending for the sake of argument that they could do that, once combat commenced those sites would be glaringly obvious, since (again, assuming they could scrape up the browsers and other transport to move it with the army :dubious:) you’d be seeing a hell of a lot of traffic in and out of those dumps. Can you say ‘target rich environment’? 
-XT
Don’t underestimate the human capacity to screw up. You’re assuming that just because all of the pieces were available they would have been put together correctly.
But maybe the Saudis would have wanted to deny the danger they were in. They might have wanted to believe Iraqi assurances that they were not going to be invaded and refused to accept evidence of Iraqi preparations. Maybe they would have tried to placate Iraq by not doing anything “provocative” like mobilizing their own troops.
And once Iraqi forces invaded, the Saudi forces might have fought. Or they might have panicked and collapsed.
And the United States might have immediately called in air strikes against the Iraqi invaders. Or they might have equivocated for a vital week.
Look at France in 1940. On paper, it had every advantage over Germany. But when the battle started, the German victory was quick and decisive.
But they did have two divisions worth of Pakistani troops stationed in Saudi Arabia and the Pakistani Government hated Saddam’s guts. They could also have sent two plus divisions within 14 days and at least a Brigade of British Troops and probably more could have joined them, remember the Baghdad Pact had seen Pakistan and Iran (to a lesser extent) develop capability to rapidly reinforce the region, capability which had been retained and the British have had contingecy plans for the place for about 150 years. Dust off old staff exersizes.
In addition Saddam’s oil exports would have died even if a single Saudi had failed a to turn up, Western Navies would have made short work of the Iraqi tade lines.
I’m assuming this was in response to me…if not, apologies. The thing is, staging a modern day forced entry type attack using modern, mobile forces (especially armor) is a huge undertaking. There is no way you could miss the signs. Not only would you be seeing all of the activity for the logistics side, but the troop movements as units were put into their jump off points would be extremely obvious. I don’t see how the Saudi’s would have missed something like that, let alone the US.
They probably wouldn’t have moved their troops to the border…nor would that have been a wise strategy anyway. Again, look at a map. The Iraqi’s would have to come pretty far into SA before they started to do any serious damage or take anything of importance. The Saudi’s have plenty of space to trade for time.
Even assuming the Iraqi’s could have put together a force and support for a real attack on SA (:dubious:!!), the Saudi’s would have had all the advantages. And this leaves aside what the US would be doing.
Why only ‘might’? And what would cause them to panic and collapse? Unless the Saudi’s were complete idiots and moved their troops up to the border to directly engage the Iraqi’s, the Iraqi’s would have had to move to engagement over unfriendly terrain…something they weren’t notably good at. And they would have had to support those armored columns across hundreds of miles of desert before they got to anything juicy enough to make their attack worth while…again, not something they were notable for.
Frankly, I think it would have been the Iraqi’s who would have been panicked and ready to collapse by the time there were more than a couple hundred kilometers in. They would have been at the end of a long and very vulnerable tether, probably getting hammered the whole time, running out of food, fuel and troops deep in enemy territory with no where to run. Even a GOOD army would be close to collapse then…and, frankly, the Iraqi’s never had a ‘good’ army, unless they were terrorizing helpless villagers. Look at their performance in the Iran/Iraq war. They were brave enough, but their tactics and training sucked the big one.
Not a chance. As soon as the first Iraqi crossed the border of SA there would have been planes in the sky, and before they had gotten very deep in there would have been bombs and missiles flying. Kuwait was a different animal…it happened pretty fast, and before the US could really do much it was all over. But Kuwait was a really small country, and Iraq was able to basically catch them more or less by surprise and simply blitz right through to the key locations before anyone could react. Once they had done that it was all over by the shouting, so no real point in attacking them from the air. SA, however, has a lot of room to play with and it would take a lot of time for Iraq to get anywhere interesting…time that the US and Saudi would have used to pound the crap out of them.
Completely different situation. For one thing, while France on paper had a credible force, their training and especially their doctrine was not even in the same universe as the Germans. Their equipment was as good or better, but equipment doesn’t win wars…men do. For another thing, France was strategically AND tactically surprised, and they simply weren’t able to recover from that surprise and didn’t have a military flexible enough to respond. Lastly, there was no nearly god like US hanging about ready to cut the Germans off at the knees with air and missile strikes from carrier task groups and subs in the region.
At the time of the first Gulf War I believe the Saudi’s were fielding second tier US equipment, with at least some US training and doctrine. On the defensive (which is what most of our equipment of that era was built for after all) they would have been more than a match for a strung out and overextended Iraqi military. It would have been a different ball game if the Saudi’s had tried to attack Iraq, but being on the defensive AND having US support?? The Iraqi’s would have been toast. I seriously doubt they would have even been able to extract most of their troops from such a cluster fuck, not if they managed to get very deeply into Saudi.
-XT
For what little I can find on the wars in the region, the book is a great read. I highly recommend it.
Iraq would have very, very soon over extended their logistic capability.
They were on a hiding to nothing whatever they did and if a miracle happened and they did occupy Saudi oilfields they would have gained no benefit as everything useful would have been scorched earthed.
I have in the past worked with the locals on the Arabian peninsula and think that they are pretty much useless in any war fighting situation.
But that is only my purely personal opinion.