Quality or Speed?
By The Defense News article appears to have gone behind the subscription wall, but it’s worth excerpting this bit:
The conventional assumption that speed and precision weapons allowed U.S. forces to rapidly defeat the Iraqi Army in early 2003 demands reassessment in light of the large numbers of close combat battles fought by invading U.S. forces against unbroken Iraqi defenders, a U.S. Army War College expert said.
During a Nov. 2 Army War College conference, “U.S. Military Operations in Iraq: Planning, Combat and Occupation,” Stephen Biddle said all of the Iraqi cities were defended along the U.S. Army’s line of advance, which forced commitment of the American reserve, the 101st and 82nd Airborne divisions, to clear the cities and secure the transportation routes.
Biddle said the Iraqis’ poor fighting skills and inadequate defenses, particularly in the cities, allowed U.S. forces to exploit their armored protection and precision firepower. He believes the same tactics employed by American ground forces, armored raids inside Baghdad, likely would have resulted in much higher casualties against a more determined and better prepared foe.
Take into account that I have an enormous amount of respect for Biddle, but I think that this analysis is probably right on. Arab military organizations have a long history of staggering ineptitude, and the Iraqi Army was never considered good even by Arab standards. Throw in twelve years of sanctions, and you have a recipe for disaster. Also, Biddle’s analysis should sound a cautionary note about suggestions that the 2003 war indicates that the Revolution in Military Affairs has taken hold and that warfare has been fundamentally transformed by precision guided weapons and new communications technologies.
What are the implications of this? Well, it matters for any plan to attack Iran or Syria. Before you say “what a ridiculous question, we can’t possibly attack anyone else in our current state” let me remind you of the nature of the current occupant of the White House. We can expect that Syrian forces will be more competent than Iraqi. They performed better than Iraqi forces in the various conflicts against Israel, and they haven’t suffered to the same extent as the Iraqi forces over the past ten years. This doesn’t mean that Syria could successfully resist a US attack, but it does make significant US casualties more likely.
Iran poses a much more interesting question. Iranian forces are larger than Iraqi and better equipped (although probably not in relation to 1991 Iraqi forces). The competence level of Iranian forces is simply unknown. It’s probably too much to expect that Iranian forces will defect or desert at anywhere near the rate that Iraqi forces did in 2003. However, the Iranian Army did not distinguish itself between 1980 and 1988, and there aren’t a lot of reasons to believe that it’s performance will have significantly improved. Of course, it might have; Iran is no longer in a revolutionary situation, it’s supply situation is much better than in 1988, and there’s been a lot more time to consolidate and revise modern doctrine.
All of this is secondary to the central problem of occupying either Iran or Syria, which is the post-conflict environment. Long story short, I would expect Syria to be a bit less troublesome than Iraq on this score, and Iran to be much, much, much more difficult than Iraq. With luck, we’ll never find out.