Military Tactics: Could Saddam Have Done Better?

By Bruce W. Nelan

When General Norman Schwarzkopf was asked to evaluate Saddam Hussein as a military leader last week, the allied commander telegraphed his answer with a derisive "Ha!" Then, with studied scorn, Schwarzkopf elaborated, "He is neither a strategist, nor is he schooled in the operational art, nor is he a tactician, nor is he a general, nor is he a soldier. Other than that, he's a great military man."

Because of the huge number of men and weapons Saddam poured into Kuwait, many military observers expected him to fight more effectively and inflict many more casualties than he did. As Schwarzkopf recounted at his wrap-up briefing, Iraqi combat forces outnumbered the coalition's 2 to 1 on the battlefield. In addition, the Iraqis had many more tanks and artillery pieces and had carefully dug them in.

The general's detailed account of the campaign was a pointed reminder that simple comparisons of numbers are of limited use in predicting a war's outcome. Much more important in this battle was a series of strategic mistakes that proved Saddam's military ineptitude.

The first, analysts now agree, was his failure to press ahead last Aug. 3 after his Republican Guard overran Kuwait. If Iraq's million-man army had gone on to invade Saudi Arabia and the gulf states, the whole shape of the struggle could have been different. "At that time there were no American forces in the area," says Andrew Duncan, assistant director of London's International Institute of Strategic Studies. "Saddam's troops could have swept down the . gulf, toppling one state after another."

Says a senior Pentagon officer: "Had Iraq occupied Saudi ports and airfields, the ((allied)) buildup as we know it would have been impossible." If Saddam had seized control of so much of the region's oil, fears of devastating price rises or of losing supplies altogether might have deterred the allies from even considering the use of force against Iraq.

Having stopped at the Saudi border, however, Saddam developed a strategic fixation on keeping Kuwait. He declared it the 19th province of Iraq and concentrated more and more of his troops -- 535,000 eventually -- on its soil or just north of the Kuwait-Iraq frontier. Apparently he hoped to refight his past war, the eight-year contest of attrition with Iran, battling from behind elaborate fortifications and minefields, with armored reserves quickly deployable to seal off enemy breakthroughs.

Saddam was so preoccupied with the defense of Kuwait that he did not extend his defensive line of berms, razor wire and mines more than a few miles west of the Kuwait frontier that faces Saudi Arabia. The struggle for Kuwait, he said in January, would finally depend on "the soldier who comes with rifle and bayonet to fight the soldier in the battle trench." In that, he boasted, "we are people with experience."

The coalition did not give the Iraqis a chance to apply it. Once the air offensive began on Jan. 16, it became obvious that for the first time air power was going to play a decisive role in war. Again Saddam made a misstep: after losing 36 fighters to allied aircraft, fighters he sent aloft, he grounded his 800-plane air force and eventually dispatched 137 of his top-of- the-line combat and transport aircraft to sanctuary in Iran. Allied planes then flew 80,000 sorties virtually unhindered and lost only 36, dramatically fewer than the 200 the coalition command had braced for. Asked how Saddam might have made better use of his multibillion-dollar air force, a U.S. Air Force general says, "Could have flown 'em."

Iraq's field army, committed to the static defense of Kuwait, simply had to dig in and take the pounding. That commitment only intensified after Saddam fell for allied bluffs that a seaborne invasion was coming. After six weeks of bombing, frontline units were isolated, mostly unable to communicate with Baghdad or one another, short of food and water. Many divisions had lost half of their equipment and, more important, their will to fight.

Victory in this war, as in all others, depended not so much on the weapons employed -- although the allies on the whole had more sophisticated equipment than Iraq had -- as on the determination of the men who had to use them. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War II, said that "morale is the greatest single factor in successful war." In the course of unrelenting bombing, weeks of hunger and Baghdad's dickering with Moscow about a withdrawal, Iraqi morale evaporated. The Saudi commander, Lieut. General Khalid bin Sultan, said Iraq's soldiers were competent enough, but "they don't believe in what they are fighting for."

The ground war proved this. While the coalition achieved victory with a wide, flanking sweep to the west, U.S., Saudi, Egyptian and Syrian divisions struck north from Saudi Arabia. They pushed directly into the Iraqi fortifications where Saddam had wanted to see them. Even there, Iraqi forces put up little resistance.

"They surprised me by not fighting harder," says Marine General Walt Boomer of the Iraqi forces. "But if they had fought for every bunker, the outcome would have been the same." There is little doubt of that, but allied casualties would have been much higher. The coalition's commanders and troops can say they did, in the end, play Saddam's game -- and beat him at it.

With reporting by Frank Melville/London and Bruce van Voorst/Washington