In no small part due to failure of the Iraqi recon elements covering the approaches to the main body to alert this main body of the US advance.
That you even think the Iraqis were competent enough to have posted a recon element to cover the approaches shows how much you overestimate them.
Pollack says something about them not using the 'computing sights'. I see no where where they explain how they reached this conclusion (especially for the Tawakalna divison) or where it says that Iraqis didn't know these things existed.
Gee, maybe you should check the citations page...
There are news articles saying how Soviet military experts were training the Iraqis even after Kuwait.
Well someone had to deliver that technical advice after all. But once the Soviet military experts had imparted that to their Iraqis counterparts, it was down to the Iraqis to disseminate the information to their subordinates. This they comprehensively failed to do so.
This wasn't even against the M1A1 that they were losing ~70 T-72s at a time, however, painting the Syrian army with a broad brush and saying every battle failing was due to exactly this reason. That is unconvincing without circumstantial evidence with a overall view Battle by battle. It is plausible that we cannot find one instance where the users of the T-72 have been able to unlock the technological opportunity for battlefield success because on every occasion they were totally unprepared. It is also possible there was no technological opportunity to begin with.
Pollack's book is labelled "Arabs at War" and not "Iraqis at War" for a reason. The Iraqis are but one case study. The failings among Iraqis personnel can be found among all the Arab armies to one degree or another. Even the very best army of the Arab states, the Jordanians, face many of the same problems that plagued the other armies: poor unit cohesion, poor inter unit co-operation, nonexistant inter-service co-operation, poor mechanical aptitude, poor passage of information, poor intelligence analysis, hoarding of logistics elements and poor support to field units, and limited strategic foresight. To name just a few. This is why you have the Iraqis massive mechanized forces struggling to overcome Iranian foot infantry despite outnumbering them and outgunning them. It's why Libyan armor lost to militia in pick-up trucks. It's why the Syrians and Egyptians repeatedly fell apart, to varying degrees, against the Israelis despite at times having every possible advantage. The Iraqi problems are systemic to all Arab militaries, throughout the entirety of the post WW2-era.
Because these were not the same forces that were only a couple years back in the Soviet military under arms, I am not seeing how training would be the issue.
I guess you never actually studied the Iraqis seriously, because they failed at tasks as basic as posting sentries...
Okay, you know what, let's look at the example of the Tawakalna 'alla Allah tank division. The Tawakalna was simply put the best division in the entire Iraqi military. The best in the Republican Guard, and significantly better than any regular army formation. It was the only formation in the Iraqis military which proved capable of proper tactical combined arms operations (see below). It was the core of the IRGC force the Iraqis committed to delay the Coalition advance and it did it's job: it delayed the VII Corps with the most viscious fighting of the war for just long enough for the rest of the army to escape. Yet even, it still fought with far less skill than any western formation. While the infantry and tanks were deployed and fought together, their positions were usually poorly thought out, and haphazard. While the Tawakalna did aggressively counter attack rather than sitting stationary in its defensive positions like any other Iraqis formation would, the counter attacks were just head on charges into the teeth of American firepower and showed no sophistication, nor higher co-ordination, generally being conducted as spastic, desperate company level efforts rather than a coordinated battalion or regiment/brigade level effort.
Now consider this was literally the best the Iraqis could do. Everyone else they had was worse. Only then will you begin to grasp how little the fact that the Iraqis were driving T-72s and the Americans were driving M1A1s mattered.
EDIT: Just remembered that this was in response to stuff about the Russians in Chechnya. In which case I have to say that no, these forces were not remotely as well trained and motivated as they had been before the Soviet collapse. If you are incapable of comprehending just how bad the post-Soviet collapse spiral hit the Russian army in the 90s, then you are sipping some serious kook-aid.
And what combined arms will the USSR have? I don't think they will have the advantage of air to land Battle like the US will in destroying recon forces etc. Nor will they not have the terrible reality of Apache helicopters working for them rather than against them.
I don't know what faff you are talking about here. That the USSR practiced combined arms conventional warfare as a matter of course can be seen through the fact they practiced it in World War II, the initial invasion of Afghanistan (when the whole thing was still a conventional conflict), and in relentless and repeated maneuvers throughout the Cold War. The Iraqis, for their part, never demonstrated the ability to conduct proper combined arms aside from the exception pf the Tawakalna mentioned above. Whenever their leadership tried, they just wouldn't do it: each of the arms would just divide into their distinct elements and conduct operations separately from one another. In almost every battle of the '91 Gulf War, the Coalition observed Iraqi artillery, tanks, and infantry operating individually, sometimes tanks with artillery, or infantry with artillery, but most of the time just one element on its own and never all three at once.
True, exactly as the Soviets learned during WWII when they entered Germany.
"When they entered Germany"? Try throughout the entire war in Europe. The average tank engagement ranges on the Eastern Front occurred between 500-800 meters, according to Soviet studies.
Yours doesn't even make sense. 800 casualties is less than the number of vehicles you said were destroyed.
I guess because you didn't actually read what I wrote. Here, I'll single it out for you, with some emphasis on a particularly relevant point:
Total vehicles neutralized are said to have been between 1,500 and 2,000 and almost all of them were commandeered civilian cars, trucks and buses for the infantry divisions... and most were not destroyed at all, but abandoned
And as to the Iraqis. Moral and training is not itself the complete explanation if you take that argument.
No, it's pretty comprehensive an explanation. After the Gul War, a number of Schwarzkopf's staffers observed that you could have swapped the equipment around and there wouldn't have been much difference in the result. In the end skilled and well led troops can and will transcend whatever junk you give them to fight with while poor troops badly led will fail no matter what fancy toys they are given. In the immortal words of Chuck Yeager: "It's the man, not the machine."
I'd argue that the Soviets would also have struggled to neutralize the threat posed by F111's and Tornados. A single Tornado or F111 could do significant damage to high value target with PGM's.
If the targets were important enough I could see NATO being prepared to accept signifant losses so long as high value targets were being destroyed. (Ie. 4 aircraft take off, 2 or 3 come back after each mission that destroys a high value target.) By most standards inflicting 25 to 50 percent attrition would be an outstanding performance for an air defence system but when a single aircraft can destroy a target it isn't really good enough in my view.
If it's that high priority a target, then doubtless the Soviets will go through with a maximum effort to protect it through not just active measures, but passive ones as well. PGMs which blows up a highly visible decoy while the real target sits nice and camouflaged nearby is of no use at all. Even worse is if you dismantle the decoys and gussy up the real thing to look like it's been taken out so as to dupe BDA.
The same issue goes for the F-117s. They are fundamentally reliant on the same targeting apparatus as the rest of NATOs strike assets and we know that Soviet techniques ultimately proved very effective at duping that apparatus in a even more advanced form in the 90s, in the Balkans.
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