Extent of Allied Military Achievement: Iraqi Soldier, Analysts
The colonel, who was not named in the BBC interview Saturday, told graphically of the furious attacks his 600-man unit faced, the toll it took and how and why the soldiers abandoned their positions.
Military analyst Michael Clarke told a seminar in London Friday that the invasion of Iraq that began March 20 had in fact "worked out almost as well as the Pentagon could have hoped," except for a first apparently failed missile attack against Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and current problems with looting in Iraqi cities and pockets of Iraqi resistance still to be subdued.
He said the allied achievement came from tight coordination between air and land forces, as well as widespread use of drones and special forces that heralded new forms of warfare in the future.
"From the beginning power was not equal. Something hit us, the aircraft destroyed our tanks and equipment," the Iraqi officer said.
He said, in rudimentary English, that from the onset of the fighting there was attrition of Iraqi forces as "every day one, two, three" soldiers would "leave his gun and go away" to flee the bombing.
The Tepublican Guards did not want to engage in street fighting in Baghdad, despite allied forces being convinced the Iraqis would make a last stand in the capital, he added.
The Iraqi soldiers' families were there and then "everything (can be) broken that's yours, so if I fight in my city, every building is mine ... those are our families, our babies," he said.
"If you want to fight, you should fight (away from) your home," he said.
The main problem, he said, was that no one told the troops what to do. Clarke, Director for Defense Studies at the International Policy Institute of the University of London, said what was "obvious (was) the power of armored warfare in a modern context, the sheer firepower that can be brought to bear."
"What's less obvious is that that armored thrust, or the potency of those thrusts, is achieved by historically unique corporations between air and ground forces," he said. He said this integration created "what the Americans have always wanted to create, a very short time between sensor and shooter, between sending a target that was worthwhile, confirming it and being able to shoot at it." Sir Timothy Garden, an analyst at the Center for Defense Studies in King's College London, said: "An awful lot of what was achieved was achieved through good intelligence with precision air attacks which did actually compromise the command and control arrangements very effectively." He said that when Iraqi forces were thus isolated, as the interviewed colonel's unit was, they had "to act independently and weren't very good at that because in a totalitarian state you're not encouraged to act independently." Clarke praised the role of "unmanned aerial vehicles, the predator and other forms of aerial sensors were really critical in this war."
He said there is more to come.
"The predator is a fairly big model airplane. In 20 or 30 years time those planes will be about the size of your hand and there will be probably tens of thousands of them all over the battlefield plus a lot of very small sensors," Clarke said.
"We're moving into an era of multiple sensors which can not be combatted in a conventional way. There is no point in trying to shoot them down," he said. He said special forces had "been pretty successful in suppressing the Scud (missile) threat which dominated our thinking in the 1991 war and in opening up crucial areas in western Iraq."
And finally, there was the stunning success in urban warfare, taking Baghdad some three weeks into the war. The Americans "applied to Baghdad the same sort of tactics they applied to the whole country, which is to sweep through open areas and avoid populated areas and hit psychologically important targets." "I think the Americans were themselves surprised at how little opposition there really was and suddenly found that by keeping to open areas of city they could achieve their essential purpose," Clarke said. (AFP)