The Chicago Tribune March 24, 2003
Allies left vulnerable in rush to Baghdad
By Stephen J. Hedges
WASHINGTON -- In their breakneck charge to Baghdad, U.S. forces have relied on a strategy dubbed "bump and run," with fast-moving Abrams tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles and Humvees racing to objectives, securing the outskirts of towns and then moving quickly to the next target.
The strategy has allowed American armored columns to converge on Baghdad in just a few days. But the dangers of trading security for speed bloodied the United States on Sunday.
Along a line of cities that U.S. and British forces had subdued but not secured--Umm Qasr, Basra, Nasiriyah--the coalition suffered its most serious casualties yet.
Nine Marines died in an ambush. A dozen members of a supply-and-maintenance unit were unaccounted for after their convoy was attacked. Across southern Iraq, members of the Republican Guard discarded their uniforms and melted into the civilian population.
The Iraqi subterfuges--such as a group of soldiers acting as if they were ready to surrender, then opening fire--seemed to surprise the U.S. troops, many of them in combat for the first time.
Sunday's attacks could well be the first deadly indications of an emerging Iraqi strategy, one that will employ guerrilla tactics, ambushes and sniping at U.S. and British forces well away from the main battlefront.
Spearheading the effort is the Fedayeen Saddam, a 15,000-member paramilitary organization led by Saddam Hussein's son Udai.
"The majority of the resistance we have faced so far comes from Saddam's special security organization and the Saddam Fedayeen," said British Maj. Gen. Peter Wall. "These are men who know that they will have no role in the building of a new Iraq, and they have no future."
Distractions threaten forces
In a briefing at U.S. Central Command in Qatar on Sunday, military leaders said members of Iraq's Republican Guard--the troops most loyal to Hussein--had been found scattered throughout regular army units in the south. Many were wearing civilian clothes.
Sniping, bombings and other attacks on U.S. forces and supply lines would be a serious distraction for allied commanders.
Sunday's attacks appear designed to play on coalition vulnerabilities. In Nasiriyah, for instance, a handful of Marines were killed by artillery fire Sunday as a group of Iraqis approached with a white flag. In another incident, troops dressed as civilians welcomed U.S. forces, then ambushed them.
Those sorts of low-intensity assaults could prove especially effective in Baghdad, where Republican Guard forces already have dispersed and, according to some news reports, moved into houses left vacant by residents fleeing the city.
U.S. commanders said their forces already were adapting to the new threat, and that more changes would be made to counteract them.
"I'm certain that the land force commanders will make some adjustments," said Army Lt. Gen. John Abizaid of the U.S. Central Command in Qatar. "But I'm also certain that when the history of this campaign is written, that people will look at this move that the land forces have made in this amount of time as being not only a great military accomplishment, but an incredible logistics accomplishment."
Still, Abizaid allowed that combat losses throughout sectors already taken would continue.
"We do not consider loss of life within the sector as a defeat of any kind," he said.
`Mopping up' concerns troops
Even so, Sunday's attacks concern U.S. troops and their commanders.
The Pentagon's war plan always envisioned moving quickly past the southern cities, recognizing that Hussein's center of power is Baghdad and that he is not popular in southern Iraq, which is dominated by Shiite Muslims who have long been repressed by his Sunni-dominated regime.
Intelligence before the war suggested that Basra in particular was protected mostly by Iraqi army regulars, the troops considered most likely to surrender, as some have.
But U.S. and British commanders have announced several times a city or sector conquered, only to encounter pockets of resistance that keep popping up. And while they call these fights "mopping up," veterans of past wars say the phrase does little to convey what can be a dangerous operation.
"You can't secure every square foot of terrain," said David Grange, a retired Army major general and chief operating officer and vice president of the McCormick Tribune Foundation. "But we are moving fast, and in an operation like this you're infantry-poor, MP [military police]-poor. The guys needed for security are very, very few, because they're fighting. That's an issue."
The U.S. battle and support forces in southern Iraq are stretched more than 200 miles from their starting point, and keeping ammunition, fuel, water and supplies running to the vanguard of the advance without encounters with enemies in the rear is a major challenge.
"You're trading speed for risk in a rear area," Grange said. "That is part of it. They have units, security forces designated to run the roads and respond by helicopter-to-[enemy] and ground-to-enemy activity that may try to hit convoys."
New doctrine heightens risk
Part of the risk has to do with the large amount of rough terrain to cover. But more of the trouble is due to a change in military doctrine since the end of the Cold War, one that puts less emphasis on conventional hulking masses of armor and more on fast, light, flexible forces.
Some of the new tactics were first evident in Afghanistan, where forces were airlifted into battles, armed only with mortars and small arms. Their artillery support came from helicopter gunships and precision bombs dropped from high above.
In Iraq, a far larger ground force is involved, but the war's first hours have revealed the methods and machinery of a lighter, more mobile U.S. force designed for what military planners believe will be this century's challenges.
An early order of business was to capture airfields, so equipment and soldiers could be moved in quickly.
U.S. forces captured a single airfield in western Iraq Friday, an area that Special Forces troops have been covertly entering from Jordan for several weeks, officials said. "There has been no resistance there," one official said.
In the north, Special Operations soldiers have joined with Kurdish units, and they also have secured airstrips for use by U.S. Air Force C-17 and C-130 cargo aircraft.
That was designed to help the coalition forces create a northern front. But a U.S. force advancing on Baghdad from the north may have many of the same rear-sector threats that the troops in the south encountered over the weekend.
And none of that sniping, analysts say, is going to end soon.
Fedayeen members fan out
U.S. intelligence believes Fedayeen members were dispatched from their strongholds in the Baghdad area to outlying areas over the last few weeks to embolden regular Iraqi troops, a senior U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told The Associated Press.
The Fedayeen are specially trained in guerrilla warfare and paramilitary tactics, and have been used by Saddam's regime to oppress internal foes. In recent years, the Fedayeen have trained recruits in provinces across Iraq, even schoolchildren as young as 12.
"They're specialists in this form of warfare, and we've seen them dress in civilian clothing or drive civilian vehicles," a senior U.S. military official said. He said military planners already were making adjustments to ensure U.S. forces can detect and repel such tactics.
"We've been in Afghanistan for a year and half now, and they're still shooting at us," said John Pike, director of Globalsecurity.org. "I think one of the concerns all along on Iraq is that it would take a long time to pacify."
Copyright © 2003, Chicago Tribune
