The International Herald Tribune April 09, 2003
British tactics make impression on U.S.
Junior partner puts its stamp on war
By Joseph Fitchett
With one British soldier in Iraq for roughly every six Americans, has Britain's force of crack units made a significant difference in a war that the United States could have fought alone?
Emphatically yes, according to officials and experts, who said Tuesday that British forces had been putting their own stamp on the campaign largely thanks to their special abilities in urban warfare after decades of guerrilla warfare and pacification efforts in Northern Ireland that instilled tactics and sharpened reflexes useful in Iraq.
"The British occupation of Basra was the pilot project for the U.S. assault on Baghdad, using tank and armor thrusts to get control of a city without taking it apart house by house," according to an aide to the U.S. defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld.
His comments amounted to a rare acknowledgment in Washington that U.S. allies at least the British can still be a military asset on a battlefield dominated by the U.S. forces' capabilities to harness technology behind devastating air and ground firepower. The ability of British forces to enhance the U.S.-led "coalition" (which includes small Australian, Polish and Hungarian units) became evident from the outset as reports conveyed a sense of steadiness among British troops, almost all of whom have done at least a tour of duty in Ulster's urban war zone. In contrast, the U.S. infantry had almost no one below the rank of noncommissioned officer with any experience under fire before the first clashes in Iraq.
An incident last week in which U.S. troops killed Iraqi women and children in a car at a checkpoint, reportedly without warning shots or strong signals from soldiers standing in the road, has been laid to poor training for American soldiers in the quasi-peacekeeping mission in Iraq.
British forces are credited with a better set of nerves and techniques than Americans in trying to win the confidence of local civilians. The combat ethos of American troops, and their stern rules about "force protection" designed to protect their comrades from attacks by snipers and saboteurs, casts them, in the eyes of local civilians, as haughty conquerors.
In contrast, British troops, constantly exposed to dangerous peacekeeping in Northern Ireland, practice open, confident behavior as a way of winning trust and acquiring intelligence for undercover operations.
Britain's reputation for tough underground warfare was confirmed at the outset of the Iraq campaign when one of their elite units, the Special Boat Service, slipped ashore the night before the Iraq assault started and infiltrated the Rumaila oil field in time to prevent the wells from being torched by Iraqi soldiers.
"It was perhaps the outstanding feat of arms so far and certainly the one that saved the coalition from an ecological and therefore political catastrophe if Saddam's orders had been carried out to set the wells ablaze," said Francois Heisbourg, one of France's best-informed security analysts.
He said that the boat service, a secret unit comparable to the U.S. Navy's Seals, managed to harry the Iraqis in the oil field all night, allowing time for the Royal Marines to move up from Kuwait after dawn to drive off the surrounding Iraqi forces and finally secure the area.
More surprising than its special force's derring-do and the sangfroid of its army in approaching the local people, Britain's success in subduing Basra has become the template for the U.S. campaign to take down the regime in Baghdad.
A Pentagon official acknowledged that the battle plan now unfolding in downtown Baghdad "was informed at the last minute," just after the seizure of Baghdad's airport last week, when U.S. field commanders consulted British officers about their success in subduing Basra.
Basra, he said, will go down as a textbook case with British forces encamping around the city they hoped to take by destroying the grip of Saddam Hussein's regime without too much destruction.
A British officer said, "The challenge was to get the Iraqis to give up the fedayeen snipers while avoiding the scenario we saw when, for example, the Israelis had to destroy much of Jenin to eliminate a few Palestinian guerrillas," a British officer said.
To convince Basra's inhabitants that Saddam's forces were on the run, the British forces, mainly Marines but also the celebrated "Desert Rats" who constitute the 7th Armored Brigade, mounted a campaign of "thunder runs" of noisy, swaggering tank thrusts several times a day along the city's main thoroughfares.
Backed by U.S. air power, this innovative use of tanks in Basra prompted a similar U.S. approach in Baghdad to get the Iraqi inhabitants to decide that the moment had come to change sides without exposing tanks to rooftop sniping and with only minimal amounts of house-to-house fighting in place where the streets are too narrow for tanks.
John Pike, director of a Washington-based think tank, Globalsecurity.org, said, "This new kind of urban offensive uses tanks and troops in armored fighting vehicles to thrust along main arteries to test out the defenses, demonstrate your overwhelming power to the locals and then seize key objectives the moment you feel organized resistance has crumbled."
This mix of firepower and psychological warfare showing U.S. presence and firepower on the ground before launching a major assault contains lessons for future wars about prying away an unpopular regime from the population, Pike said.
A British officer said from London: "You have to demonstrate your presence and your intention to stay till the show is over. You have to show discrimination between the regime's bad guys and potential friendlies. You have to ready to gamble and lunge when the opportunity is there."
At the same time, British forces in Basra demonstrated their ability to operate on the ground to win over the initially suspicious population.
As they have been trained to do, British troops replaced their helmets as soon as possible with berets in Basra. The softer headgear is considered to create a much more reassuring, less threatening appearance as fighters try to build up confidence among local people.
For the same reason, the British Army has banned Rambo-style sunglasses of the sort favored by intimidating U.S. state troopers.
A British policymaker said, "Basically, Americans think in terms of instilling fear all around them while British fighters have an additional reflex of trying to win trust, too, and trying to remain accessible to people who want to change sides."
Besides winning hearts and minds, the British wanted to attract defectors and get intelligence. According to reports published Tuesday, the campaign reaped a bonanza of timely information about key Iraqi sites and regime leaders in Basra and Baghdad.
According to The Guardian in London, Iraqi informers were used in Basra to identify Ba'ath Party officials.
Copyright © 2003, International Herald Tribune
