Iraq's Armed Forces

No sooner was the Gulf War over than those who had opposed it began pointing out that it "hadn't been an even match," as Bill Moyers put it. Certainly the match had been as even as Saddam Hussein had been able to make it. The Great Dictator had spent considerable time and effort in trying to lift his armed forces out of the Third World category.

Certainly Iraq’s ground forces were impressive. There were 900,000 troops organized into approximately 60 regular and eight Republican Guard divisions.^[8]  There were 5,700 tanks, 5,000 armored vehicles such as personnel carriers, and 5,000 other support vehicles. There were 3,700 artillery pieces, many of them self-propelled, including Soviet and Brazilian multiple rocket launchers. There were 160 armed helicopters and gunships, including Mi-8s and Mi-24s such as the Soviets had used in Afghanistan. The ground forces had been tested and tempered in the course of years of combat with the Iranians.

The air forces as well were edging out of the Third World category. The mark of the Third World is that while a country may possess some highly sophisticated equipment, it is bought from someone else who did the development and is often responsible for the maintenance. The Iraqi Air Force had 750 fighter, bomber and armed trainer aircraft, with 200 support aircraft. Much of its equipment was quite sophisticated, to include an Iraqi-built airborne early warning aircraft based on the Soviet Il-76 CANDID transport. The inventory also included the MiG-29, the MiG-27, the MiG-25, the Su-24, all Soviet-built; and the French Mirage F-1.

Third World inventories are also usually limited to fighter and interceptor aircraft. But the Iraqis also possessed the Tu-16 and Tu-22 bombers — unusual in a Third World arsenal. There were 24 main operating bases and 30 dispersal bases, with nuclear-hardened shelters and multiple taxiways and runways.

Despite this numerical and technological strength, the Iraqi air force made a poor showing in the Iran-Iraq war. Any air force possesses the potential to carry out a coup d'etat, since it can destroy the national leadership by air attack. To ensure against this, Saddam's regime either consciously or unconsciously held down the capabilities of the air force's pilots and crews. They were given plush accomodations and luxury cars, they were well-paid, but they were not allowed enough flight time to become really skilled.

It was partly this fear of overthrow from the air that caused Saddam to build a complex of heavily reinforced, deeply buried bunkers to protect himself, his senior officials, and the Republican Guard command structure. This had the side effect of allowing them as well to live through the Coalition's air attacks when they eventually came.

Hard shelters had been built in large numbers to shield Iraq's aircraft against surprise attack. Many had a blast wall in front of their entrance, which could provide useful protection. It also blocked the entrance so the planes could not scramble. Indeed, in the event of a coup attempt by the air force, a tank could destroy the plane in its shelter long before it could be laboriously dragged out. By way of contrast, NATO and the Warsaw Pact countries both avoided any obstructions to quick take-off. Perhaps their air forces were more trustworthy.

Iraq had patterned its air defenses on standard Soviet practice: a redundant, "layered" system that blended radars, hardened and buried command and control facilities, surface-to-air missiles, interceptor aircraft, and antiaircraft artillery. There were 16,000 radar-guided and heat-seeking surface-to-air missiles. These ranged from the shoulder-fired SA-7 and SA-14, and the SA-2 and SA-3 that had been faced by American pilots in Vietnam, to much newer and more capable equipment. When the war began the defenses of Baghdad were denser than the most heavily defended Eastern European target at the height of the Cold War. They were seven times as dense as Hanoi's defenses had been before Linebacker II in 1972.

During the 1980s Iraq had devoted considerable effort toward developing weapons of mass destruction. While conventional weapons are quite capable of destroying significant numbers of people, "weapons of mass destruction" are a distinct sub-category of armament: those with nuclear, biological or chemical capabilities. There was an aggressive program in effect to illegally purchase critical materials for all three types of weapons from abroad, including from companies in the United States.^[9] The chemical weapons program produced sufficient quantities of lethal gas to allow the Iraqis to use it liberally against the Iranians in their war. Subsequently it was used against Iraq's Kurdish population in particularly brutal and wanton attacks. At the time the war began, Iraq had the dubious distinction of being the only nation to use poison gas on the battlefield since 1918. Its gassing of the Kurds remains the only documented instance of a regime systematically and intentionally gassing its citizens since the Nazi atrocities of the Second World War.

If one will have weapons of mass destruction, so also must one have the means of their delivery. Iraq had approximately 1,200 SCUD and SCUD-derivative missiles, to include the locally modified or manufactured al-Hussein and al-Abbas. On a more exotic plane, Iraq had contracts with foreign firms to develop such items of passing interest as electronic detonators suitable for nuclear weapons and a large-bore hypervelocity long-range cannon. Saddam Hussein's childhood love of guns had developed into a full-scale love affair with weaponry of all sorts.

The Soviet Union had more than just a patron-client relationship with the regime in Iraq; there was a heavy investment in prestige as well. Not only was the country heavily armed with Soviet equipment, but a good part of the officer corps had been trained in the Soviet Union. Much of Soviet military doctrine had been adapted to the Iraqis’ own situation. The Gulf War was in that respect a conflict between two competing schools of military thought. The Soviet school lost.

Actually, Soviet doctrine received an unfair beating. War with the Soviets, had it come, would have been an entirely different matter from war with Iraq. The terrain in Europe — the likely scene of any war between the two superpowers — is different from that of the Persian Gulf. Export equipment was not the same as that kept for use by the Soviet Army; the T-72, for instance, had been used by the East Germans, while the Soviets had used the more sophisticated T-64 and later the T-80 in the forward area. Most importantly, the Soviets trained and maintained a dedicated, professional military cadre that would not have abandoned the field without a fight.

Iraq being Iraq, the selection of those officers who were sent to study in the Soviet Union’s system of higher military schools was based not so much on merit as on a combination of nepotism and reliability. Given the luck of the draw, Uncle Abdullah’s nephew was just as likely to spend his time in Leningrad developing a taste for vodka and chasing slavic blondes as he was in studying the Battle of Kursk or the proper depth of sector for an tank division in a meeting engagement. Even if he did devote the time and effort to achieving proficiency in military matters, over-successful officers in Iraq had a distressing habit of becoming involved in fatal helicopter crashes and similar unfortunate accidents. When living under a cult of personality, it is unwise to show too much personality of one’s own.

Tipping the scales against a close adherence to the Soviet model, the Iraqi army was conditioned by its long and grueling war with Iran. This was a war in which the main threat had come from frontal human wave attacks, rather than a war of thought and maneuver. The Iranians, with few exceptions, had not fielded a modern, professional army, just a big, fanatical one. At the beginning of the war the mullahs had in fact been in the process of destroying the well-trained Iranian officers’ corps and replacing it with their own cadres. Combat simply provided another method of disposing of the religiously unreliable. The end result was an officers’ corps not even up to the same par as the Iraqis’, and a war in which large quantities of men and materiel were needlessly sacrificed by both sides. It was in many ways a replay of World War I.

Iraq's army was divided into three parts. The model for this was not so much the Soviet model as the German, as applied during the Second World War. At the top end of the lineup was the Republican Guard, nine divisions which were equipped with the highest quality, most sophisticated armament the Ba'ath regime could lay hands on. Better paid, fed and led than the rest of the army, the Republican Guard troops were picked for their loyalty to the regime. They would correspond to Hitler's SS, with overtones of the Soviets' NKVD divisions. Their functions included internal security, and, while they were not the "elite" units the western press tried to make them out to be, they were the best the Iraqis had to offer.

Corresponding to the Wehrmacht, the Iraqi regular army was thoroughly mechanized and was fairly well trained and led. There were about nine of these divisions in the Kuwait sector at the start of Desert Storm, three of them deployed with the Republican Guard and the remaining six intended to be used as the main striking force in their respective corps sectors.

The bulk of Iraq's strength in Kuwait was to be found in the People's Army, corresponding to Hitler's SA — which had not been used as a fighting force in Germany's war, with good reason. The People's Army was made up of poorly trained conscripts, relatively lightly armed. Its primary function was to act as cannon fodder, slowing down the Coalition advance, bogging it down and inflicting casualties as it could, setting the attackers up for a decisive counterblow by the regular army units. Once the attackers had been dealt with in this manner, the regular units could disengage and the heavily armored shock troops of the Republican Guard, the strategic reserve, could counterattack.

All of this looked very well in theory. It is in fact an adaptation, perhaps twice removed, of Soviet doctrine. The problem lay with the quality of troops making up the People's Army, their expectations of combat, and with the tensions built in among the three levels of units.

The most important thing an army does is train. The higher the quality of a force, the more time it spends either training in the field or preparing to go to the field to train. Modern warfare is an intricate process, with literally hundreds of factors each dependent upon the other. Simply moving a force from one place to another is an evolution that has to be practiced time and time again. To simply call up large numbers of men, give them guns and uniforms and send them to fight is effectively to destroy them. Without training, they are simply a large number of people, perhaps dangerous on an individual level, but of no real consequence as a military force. The trained force wins every time, unless submerged by sheer weight of numbers.

At the same time, the establishment of a pecking order among the three types of ground forces units had the effect of undermining morale. The regular army could be expected to be as jealous of the Republican Guard's usurpation of its functions as was the Wehrmacht of the SS. The People's Army, at the bottom of the heap, with the least desirable and least effective equipment, leadership and training, could hardly even be expected to regard itself as a fighting force. The Ba'ath thus managed to undermine force cohesiveness, a situation aggravated by the purely political requirements of disposing of officers who became too popular — or too successful.

Finally, the People's Army's expectation was that it was going to take heavy casualties. That was its function. It is much easier for a man in an air conditioned office wearing a clean, pressed uniform, to decide another man should die an heroic death at the front than it is for the man at the front to actually do it. By taking away the legitimate avenue to self-preservation, the regime left open only the illegitimate avenue: token resistance (if any) followed by either withdrawal or surrender, with the expectation that the heavier armed, more effective units of the regular army would pick up the slack.

Once the People's Army broke, the panic was to spread quickly. Panic is a contagious disease on the battlefield. The bulk of the Iraqi force was concentrated in the People's Army units, with only six regular divisions available for a counterblow; infected by the panic, and by the knowledge of their own inadequacy in the face of overwhelming force, they would melt nearly as quickly and thoroughly as the farm boys and factory workers of the People's Army. That would leave the Republican Guard exposed, with effectively no screening force at all.