Boston Globe January 12, 2003
As US masses, weakened Iraqi forces sit tight
By Robert Schlesinger
WASHINGTON - The US military continues to bulk up its forces in the Persian Gulf, but the Iraqi military has not begun any significant, visible preparations for a US invasion, according to military and intelligence sources, who say that Saddam Hussein's placid posture may offer a clue to his strategy.
Military officials say that while the Iraqi armed forces have taken low-level defense measures and continued to rebuild their infrastructure since the end of the Gulf War, their weapons and troops have deteriorated over the past decade, and Hussein's military commanders have not redeployed troops on a large scale or taken other steps to prepare to repel a US attack.
Outside analysts and Defense Department sources noted that many Iraqi troops are already deployed in places where they are needed to maintain internal order, and they suggested that Hussein may not believe that a US attack is imminent. The Iraqi armed forces' main job since the end of the Gulf War has been internal security, a role made only more important by the possibility of a US assault.
It was too soon to say whether Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's new orders to deploy 62,000 more troops in the region would prompt a change in the Iraqi's military posture, but many analysts said Hussein's stance to date could portend a defense predicated on weapons of mass destruction and urban combat, especially given the imbalance of power between Iraqi and US forces.
''I don't even know to what extent they're going to engage in a formal defense,'' said Owen Cote Jr., the associate director of MIT's Security Studies program.
Analysts noted that cities are naturally tough military terrain that require little formal preparation for battle.
''They may realize that their only hope is ... chemical weapons plus urban combat,'' added John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org, a defense think tank, which periodically uses commercial satellites to examine Iraqi troop deployments. ''There is nothing between [US] V Corps and Baghdad but the Euphrates River.''
The conventional Iraqi armed forces, with decades-old weapons systems that can barely be kept running, have diminished since the Gulf War, according to US defense officials and other military analysts.
Cote said that in the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq was only able to field a ''Third World military.''
''In the interim, the Iraqi military has done nothing except decline in size and degrade in capability,'' he said.
In 1990, Iraq's armed forces numbered roughly 1 million men, divided into 67 to 70 divisions and supported by 5,500 tanks. Today the active military, by most estimates, has about 400,000 people divided among roughly 23 divisions, including a half-dozen Republican Guard divisions. While there may be as many as 300,000 more soldiers in reserve, those divisions are severely undermanned and rely on only about 2,200 tanks. The Pentagon is prepared to send as many as 250,000 US troops in the event of war with Iraq, according to published reports.
But the numbers do not adeqately illustrate the Iraqi military's state of disrepair.
Most of the Iraqi tanks are T-54s, T-55s, and T-62s - Soviet designs, some of which date to the 1940s. They were the type of tank that rolled into Hungary in 1956 and into Czechoslovakia a dozen years later.
''These are iron coffins,'' said Michael Eisenstadt, a former Army analyst currently a senior fellow with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
The Iraqis have roughly 700 relatively modern T-72 tanks, but these were outmatched by heavier US tanks during the Gulf War. US tanks fire more accurately and at longer range - almost as far as 10,000 feet compared with about 6,000 feet for Iraqi tanks.
''The American tanks routinely blew the turrets off the Soviet-designed tanks ... before the Iraqi tanks even thought they were in the battle,'' said Pike.
The T-72 has numerous other disadvantages. Its auto-loading mechanism tends to break down. Its armor is thin - a weakness that was compounded by the US use of dense, depleted uranium shells that tore through the tanks. And storage units for the ammunition and fuel are not sufficiently separated. ''They tend to burn,'' Eisenstadt said.
As a result, said Cote, US forces found the T-72 was vulnerable to the 25mm cannon mounted on the US Bradley fighting vehicle, ''which is not even remotely supposed to be an antitank weapon,'' he said.
The tank imbalance is typical of the Iraqi- US mismatch. Twelve years ago, Iraq had acceptable Soviet and South African artillery, but Iraqi ''fire doctrine was basically just barrage in the general direction of the enemy,'' said Pike. ''Whereas the fire support for American artillery - you're firing at a specific point and you know that there's something worth blowing up at that specific point.''
The Iraqi Air Force, such as it is, has not recovered from the Gulf War. At the time, Hussein sent many of his most sophisticated planes to Iran to prevent their destruction by allied forces. They are now part of the Iranian Air Force. The most advanced planes in the remaining Iraqi force include a handful of Soviet MiG-29s and French Mirage F-1s. None of these planes have the sophisticated electronics or extended weapons range of their US counterparts.
''I assume that all of their pilots are getting their affairs in order,'' Pike said.
The planes could ''be used in a missile trap type thing where they try to bait our aircraft to go after them so they can be fired at by other missiles,'' a Defense Department official said.
One area where the Iraqis may have made progress is in their air defense system. The Iraqis have one of the densest air defenses in the world, with surface-to-air missiles and antiaircraft artillery in a networked system that uses techniques designed to minimize their exposure to US counterstrikes. While they have not managed to bring down any allied pilots patrolling the northern and southern ''no-fly'' zones, 10 years of trying have taught them valuable lessons. Analysts say Iraq now turns its radars on less frequently to avoid being targeted. ''They're really not any better at shooting down American aircraft than they were before, but they are better at surviving.''
While Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld changed US strategy in responding to these attacks to one focused on systematically degrading the Iraqi air defenses, one defense official said that the sorties have been too infrequent to succeed.
''You're not going to do it plinking a site or two every few days or so,'' said the defense official. ''Now what you are degrading is the morale of the people operating it.''
The official added: ''These people know that if they turn on the radar, they're going to get bombed. The morale of the people running the air defense has been considerably shaken over the years.''
That human element - the extent to which demoralized Iraqi troops might surrender en masse as in the Gulf War, when they surrendered by the thousands - remains one of the greatest puzzles for Pentagon planners.
In trying to divine how the Iraqi military will react, military analysts distinguish the regular army and the Republican Guard from the Special Republican Guard and other internal security units. The regular army, which is roughly 300,000-strong, is at the bottom of the Iraqi armed forces in terms of supplies, treatment, and morale and is viewed as the most likely to crack.
''It's quite possible that large parts of the Iraqi military will either stand aside or desert or surrender,'' Eisenstadt said.
But retired General Wesley K. Clark, former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, cautioned against underestimating Iraqi fighters, especially when defending their homeland.
''There are probably a lot of real hard-heads in there who will fight against us for real xenophobic reasons,'' Clark said. ''Courage and physical aptitude is pretty much a normal distribution across mankind as far as I can see.''
Several Republican Guard units fought with impressive vigor - although they suffered from debilitatingly inferior training - during the Gulf War. However a number of the coup plots in the intervening years have come from those same ranks, and many fighters could decide not to fight an unwinnable battle. The Republican Guard, with 50,000 to 80,000 troops, was originally conceived as a kind of praetorian guard, but during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, the units were expanded and took on more of a combat role.
The Special Republican Guard, numbering 15,000 to 20,000, was formed to take over the role of palace guard. They are the best equipped and trained.
While the Iraqi armed forces' main task is internal security, Hussein's regime also has tens of thousands of others in various paramilitary and security groups, such as Fidayin Saddam, which is run by his son Uday.
''They will fight because they know that if the regime goes down, they're the ones whose headless corpses will turn up bobbing in the river,'' Pike said.
Copyright © 2003 Boston Globe
