The Redhunter

• Saddam’s December 18 2005 change in war plans (reviewed in Part V) seriously impacted the ability of competent Iraqi commanders to put together a good defense of their country. Saddam’s plan was hopelessly unrealistic and completely unworkable.

• Iraqi commanders, and Saddam himself, expected a coalition invasion to be preceded by weeks of air strikes. They were shocked when the ground campaign began before the air one.

• “Coalition planners underappreciated the psychological effects precision firepower had on Iraqi combat units.” Everyone, from commanding generals to the lowest private, believed that the invasion was unstoppable. Said the commander of the Republican Guard I Corps; “The Americans were able to induce fear throughout the army by using precision air power.”

• Propaganda leaflets dropped by American aircraft also frightened Iraqi soldiers, not for what they said, but because the US Air Force seemed to know just where to drop them it made the Iraqis “feel as if they were in a sniper’s sight.”

• Airpower devastated entire Iraqi divisions, many being completely destroyed without ever having been engaged by American ground forces.

• Saddam was very fearful of being personally targeted by American air strikes, and went to great lengths to hide his movements.

• Because American forces bypassed most cities in the south, leaving the Iraqi forces in them to come out and attack American supply convoys, Iraqi commanders believed reports that their troops were slaughtering the Americans and that everything was going according to plan.

• The Iraqis lost track of events to the extent that they believed that the main American armored attack was coming out of Jordan.

• During the invasion, several Iraqi corps and divisional commanders correctly deducted coalition strategy, and attempted to communicate it to senior Ba’ath party leaders, including Saddam And Qusay, only to be rebuffed. Many times during the invasion Army orders were countermanded and requests denied by the political leadership.

• Saddam delegated operational control to Qusay at some point during the invasion. Qusay, like his father, lived in an imaginary universe and refused to take advice from professional army officers.

• Even after Baghdad had fallen, “the awareness of this catastrophic military defeat only slowly dawned on Saddam and those around him. Those at the center of power still kept a solid hold on unreality.” Saddam kept giving orders to maneuver units that had ceased to exist.

• “As far as can be determined through interviews conducted for this book, there were no national plans to transition to a guerrilla war in the event of military defeat. Nor, as their world crumbled around them, did the regime appear to cobble together such plans.”

• Even as defeat loomed near, the Iraqi bureaucracy, both civilian and military, continued to operate as if nothing special was happening.

My Take

What stands out most clearly in this chapter is how effective the American attack was in creating confusion among the Iraqi leadership, both civilian and military. The United States did three things to help create this state of affairs:

1) Starting the ground assault before the air campaign

2) Bypassing southern cities and leaving them to "wither on the vine"(the Pacific in WWII, anyone?)

3) The effectivness of precision air strikes

From the very beginning the Iraqi leadership was unable to keep up with events on the battlefield. For months they had been "digging in" their units in preparation for what would surely be a lengthy air campaign before the ground assault started. When they realized that coalition ground forces were immediately moving into their country, they found themselves caught on the horns of a dilemna; if they tried to move their units they would be detected and hit with air power, if they stayed in place they would not be where they were needed. As it is, many units stayed in place and were totally destroyed anyway.

Although the authors do not mention "shock and awe", it is clear that our air assault did just that to the Iraqi units that we hit. The report only discusses tactical air strikes (those against military targets), however. The strategic strikes in Baghdad against Ba'athist party and government buildings is left out of the report, so their effect is not assessed here.

At any rate, it is also clear that our air strikes were even more effective than we knew at the time.

Iraqi forces would have been defeated no matter what they did. But we need to remember that if the more competent generals had not been hamstrung by Saddam's insane orders, they would definately have given us a tougher time and inflicted greater casualties on us.

As I mentioned in previous parts of this series, one almost starts to feel sorry for the Iraqi generals after reading page after page of how their directives were countermanded by a delusional political leadership, and how Saddam forced his completely unrealistic plans on them. Althought they were defending an evil regime, for some reason I harbor no animus towards them, assuming of course that they are not guilty of crimes such as murder of civilians.

As Lt. Gen Hamdani was at a meeting in which he gave bad news to Qusay and senior (lackey) generals

Only Qusay seemed somewhat alarmed at the news. The other generals ignored it and turned to discussing the shape that the minefields to the west of Baghdad should take. Hamdani commented on the dismal scene: "It wasthe kind of arguments that I imagine took place in Hitler's bunker in Berlin. Were all these men on drugs?"

Finally, as was mentioned also in part V, the Iraqis had no plans to transition to guerilla war if they should lose the conventional one. While this does not mean that there was no way we should have anticipated one, it does mean that one cannot chalk this up to a failure of intelligence.

Next up: Methodology, Preconceived Notions, and Hindsight