Stardate 20020215.1115

(Captain's log): I've been spending a lot of time thinking about the strategic and tactical issues involved in going to war in Iraq, and I thought I'd write a few articles about it. You'll be seeing them trickle out over the next few days. This is just me thinking; it is surely not intended to be a prediction about how it will actually happen or anything pretentious like that.

Part I: Iranian intervention
Part II: The problem of air supremacy and general Iraqi tactics
Part III: Axis of attack
Part IV: Development of the battlefield
Part V: Why not like in Afghanistan?

One aspect of war is to present your opponent with problems to solve. In the ideal case this will put him in the position where whatever he does the result is bad for him, but it is more common for it to leave him with only one reasonable course of action, which you can predict. This means that you can then plan on the basis of having a pretty good idea what he'll do next.

American doctrine involves gaining air supremacy over any battlefield where American troops fight, and in Iraq it is to be expected that we will do this again. This involves nullifying enemy air assets, destroying air defenses, and then taking advantage of air power to benefit the ground forces. This doesn't guarantee a win, but it surely stacks the deck in your favor.

The biggest mistake that Iraq made in 1990 was to concentrate the majority of its forces into fixed positions near the front line. This was a perfect situation to permit us to capitalize on air power; we could isolate those units by cutting communications (which refers not only to the ability to send messages but also to the ability to provide supplies and reinforcements; cutting this is known as interdiction) and then to pound those forces with area-effect anti-personnel weaponry such as FAE's and cluster bombs and psych warfare. It is very scary for front line soldiers to be cut off and to be pounded; the soldiers soon lose the ability and the will to fight.

I don't expect Iraq to make the same mistake this time. There may well be some front line troops guarding borders but I don't expect the majority of their forces to be concentrated there. The vast majority of their forces will be held back as a mobile reserve and will be committed to mobile battle once the invasion commits.

That means that they will be kept back (probably in the vicinity of Baghdad) and kept dispersed. (Many will probably be kept in cities surrounded by civilians.) This is the best defensive posture against air supremacy; short of the use of large-yield nukes air cannot really do more than pick away at such forces and very slowly diminish their capabilities. Note that this is what Iraq did with the Republican Guard in 1990, and those forces were not substantially weakened by air power and had to be destroyed on the ground.

Once the shape of the threat is recognized, the problem with dispersal is that it doesn't provide striking power. It becomes necessary to concentrate for attack, and once concentrated the force becomes more vulnerable to enemy air attack. If it is handled well then concentration happens at the very last moment and then the forces engage the enemy closely in hopes of being too close to enemy ground forces to permit enemy air attacks.

All of this is problematic. It takes a well disciplined force to do these things. There is a window after concentration before engagement in which the force will be vulnerable to concentrated air assault. You would need to make sure that your concentration area's transportation cannot be disrupted by loss of key transportation assets (i.e. bridges and rail lines and major highways, which will surely be destroyed). Your enemy may try to harass you with air-laid minefields.

With American precision weapons and close air-ground coordination, "engage closely" may not be enough to completely eliminate the threat of air attack. It will, at the very least, prevent the use of area-effect weapons, which is itself good, but there probably isn't anything that can be done to prevent use of precision weapons. On the other hand, it may be possible to overwhelm the enemy's air assets. He (i.e. the Americans) does not have an infinite number of jets and helicopters and during this interval there is a limit to how much damage he can do to the ground force. Thus the best defense is speed, to minimize the time window of vulnerability.

Losses will be taken. The idea here is to minimize them and to maintain a coherent ground force long enough to engage the enemy's ground force.

If I was Saddam Hussein, my goal in the war would be to kill or wound as many Americans as I could, in hopes that the American public would lose heart and demand that their politicians withdraw. I, commanding the Iraqi forces, know full well that I can't actually defeat the US if the US is willing to pay the price. What I want to do is to make the price as high as I can. What I want to avoid if at all possible is a repeat of 1990. The ground action must be slow and bloody for the Americans; none of this hundred-hour horseshit.

So my goal is not to hold territory; that was the mistake I made in 1990. Territory doesn't matter. My goal is to shed American blood, and that means preserving enough of my force to be able to commit it to a fluid action against the Americans. I accept that my