Iraq does better in the 1st Gulf War?

what about the israeli's not taking out the Iraqi nuke site; and saddam having nukes prior to going into kuwait

Supposedly the Iraqis were actually relatively close to getting a basic nuclear device even without that facility. I can't remember the exact source, but I remember Dick Cheney going ballistic when it was found out that Iraq was about a year away from a basic nuclear test, and that the CIA had not caught it. This later was part of the reasoning for his distrust of the CIA's abilities during the Bush II Administration​
 
Supposedly the Iraqis were actually relatively close to getting a basic nuclear device even without that facility. I can't remember the exact source, but I remember Dick Cheney going ballistic when it was found out that Iraq was about a year away from a basic nuclear test, and that the CIA had not caught it. This later was part of the reasoning for his distrust of the CIA's abilities during the Bush II Administration

As I recall, Iraq was about a year away from a nuke test for about twelve years. :rolleyes:
 
I'm not aware of any systematic use of decoys. Iraqi aircraft and tanks might have suffered a lower toll from aircraft had they done so.

Well they decoyed scuds by accident with oil tankers

In terms of the airforce, they had a lot more aircraft shelters than they needed, all built to a really high standard, higher than NATO standard. They did paint black crater circles on some of them which threw the coalition off, when we didn't realise we didn't have good records of which we bombed.

But the extra shelters and the decoying did them no good, since the West had enough air power to bomb all the shelters, including many of them twice. It was after this became apparent, quite early in the war, that fleeing to Iran became a logical strategy to give a chance of preserving part of the airforce.
 
Steel Rain

In the 70's, US designed a missile to carry a load of steel penetrator rods. Dropped on the enemies' airbases, it was to be a giant shotgun blast effect. If SH fired a couple of hundred of these at the 5 major airbases, loss of life and equipment would have horrific.Tight security would have kept them a total surprise.A huge rethink of the war by the Allies?:eek:
 

Cook

Banned
In the 70's, US designed a missile to carry a load of steel penetrator rods. Dropped on the enemies' airbases, it was to be a giant shotgun blast effect. If SH fired a couple of hundred of these at the 5 major airbases, loss of life and equipment would have horrific.Tight security would have kept them a total surprise.A huge rethink of the war by the Allies?:eek:

I see a couple of snags here.

His primary missile was the Scud. Saddam had others in his inventory but they were local modifications of the Scud, so his launcher would be a Scud derivative. Scud accuracy isn’t much better than the V2, you can count on hitting a city with reasonable confidence, saturating a target smaller than that is going to be seriously difficult and would indeed require hundreds of missiles, which Saddam did not have the manufacturing capability to produce. Thanks to his behaviour in the 1980s Iraq was very closely watched by several western intelligence agencies, one in particular that would take a keen interest in anything associated with either long rang missiles or superguns.

The other problem is the warheads; the Steel penetrator rods you are referring to was Thor and they were to be precision guided weapons. Developing such a weapon isn’t something a small country like Iraq had the capacity to do even if it hadn’t spent eight years at war with its neighbour. Unguided rods would do less damage than High Explosive warheads would since the odds of them hitting anything significant is so low.
 
Saddam's best shot was to keep going once his forces hit the Saudi border. Indeed, why wait at all?Use his long-range striking power - Scud derivatives, Su-24s, Tu-16/H-6s, MiG-23s, to hit as deep into Saudi Arabia as possible while the Kuwaiti operation was ongoing - take out as much infrastructure that the US would need as possible. Anything that looks like important gets bombed. Heck, try and do a suicide run - see if you can get some Antonovs and helos filled with competent but expendable troops into as as many airfields and Saudi oil fields as possible. Don't think occupation - think deny the Coalition secure staging areas. Make the airlift run a MANPADS gauntlet. And if they've got a presence in the oil fields (which is what its all about, after all) it'll be hard to get control back without laying waste to the facilities in the process.
 
One problem with the above: the Su-24 force was not combat-ready. And the MiG-23BN nor the Su-22s didn't have the range to get down to Dhahran or Riyadh. The Badgers did, but the RSAF (and when they get there, the USAF, RAF, and USN) could handle them. The only offensive Iraqi strike was on 24 Feb 91, when two Mirage F-1s attempted a strike on the tanker terminal at Ras Tamurah. A RSAF F-15 pilot downed both with AIM-9; if the Mirages had turned to avoid him, they would've had their faces full of F-14 Tomcat, as two Tomcats were in final checks before shooting AIM-54s...
 
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