By the outbreak of the Iran–Iraq War, the force had grown to nine divisions. Iraq's losses in armor and artillery would have been even worse, had not Iraq withdrawn some T-72s from Kuwait before the assault, and if the allies had not halted the fighting after 100 hours, enabling a large number of Republican Guard units to escape with their tanks and armored personnel carriers. “The guy is very calculating, very smart and in a way, very charismatic. The risks for Hussein are literally life or death, analysts say. At the top, the military has serious and longstanding problems, analysts said, starting with Hussein, a self-appointed field marshal who never served in the army. A fifth was formed in 1959. “Above that, there’s what I call a ‘rubber layer'--things bounce pretty crazy. He is likely to be toppled and killed if this adventure fails, although he is not now considered to be in jeopardy of a rebellion within the military. Given the closed nature of Iraq, obtaining independent information about such matters as judicial procedure and the exercise of the rule of law is particularly difficult for any external observer, whether a diplomat or a human rights worker. U.S. intelligence agencies consider Iraq the world’s largest producer of chemical weapons, and Iraq is known to have active programs to produce biological and nuclear weapons. In addition, Army libraries, Army and DOD schools, HQ DA and MACOM staff agencies with responsibility for ar- mored, direct fire, ground combat systems, or- ganizations, and the training of personnel for such organizations may request two copies by sending a military … When battle does not advance as laid out in the textbook, military experts say, the Iraqis often do not know what to do. At the higher ranks, however, there appears to be some discrimination, with a disproportionate number of Sunnis serving as senior commanders and generals, U.S. analysts said. The Iraqi army is an experienced, highly disciplined and well-equipped force--capable even of a complex helicopter-borne assault like the commando raid 10 days ago that seized the emir’s palace in Kuwait city long before heavy tanks arrived to secure the captured capital. Also, Iraq--by Third World standards at least--has developed a formidable munitions industry, developing even such relatively sophisticated military hardware as ballistic missiles, airborne radar and chemical and nuclear weapons. To overcome that inertia, the Iraqis in recent years have turned to extremes. During the war, their command and control was destroyed as well as their air force was destroyed prior to the ground war. Farzad Bazoft, an Iranian-born journalist working for The Observer, the London weekly, had be… And each of these soldiers is held to a standard of unquestioning loyalty to one man: Saddam Hussein. The Iraqi senior staff is riddled with incompetents chosen not for military prowess but for allegiance to Hussein, according to American analysts. Saddam's military in 1990 was a highly experienced combat force, having emerged two years earlier as the nominal victor in an eight-year war with neighboring Iran. But the Goliath of the Middle East has critical weaknesses, shortcomings that U.S. military planners will seek to exploit if the current standoff in the desert should become a shooting war. Because of clear imbalance in firepower, Saddam's best regular troops, the elite Republican Guard divisions defending Baghdad, are expected to disperse their tanks and guns in concealed positions _ including populated areas. However, the modern era's Iraqi arm The Soviet Union spends between 15% and 20% of its economic output on arms; the United States devotes about 6% to the military, and Israel--Hussein’s sworn enemy--just under 15%. They have also developed indigenous radar planes similar to the U.S. airborne warning and control system (AWACS) surveillance aircraft, although the planes are said to be of questionable quality. No one, however, is speaking of trying to dislodge the 150,000-member Iraqi force now dug into fortified positions in southern Kuwait. Iraqi troops were already stationed along the border. They’re approaching 80 full divisions,” a government analyst said. The stakes are huge for both sides. During the fighting at Hindiyah, Iraqi soldiers, many in civilian clothes, fired rocket-propelled grenades and small arms at the American tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles. Already Iraq’s army is the fifth largest in the world, a million men and growing, larger in raw numbers than the U.S. Army and Marine Corps combined. “Some small units can be very good, but the overall units might not be.”. Baghdad's 900,000-member army was exceeded in size only by those of China, the Soviet Union and Vietnam. Nerve gas, spread by bombs or artillery, became a superior form of firepower to pin down and overrun defending forces. No other nation approaches that percentage of national wealth devoted to the military. With about 6,000 battle tanks, 300 fighter planes and a vast array of missiles, Iraqi war-making equipment is impressive by any standard. A part of the museum since the early 1990s, the display features multiple photos and artifacts from the Gulf War, from a U.S. Army uniform from the era to U.S. and Iraqi … The guy is also a thug. The weakness of this formidable array was "feeble logistics and a centralized system of command and control in which important decisions, even in the heat of battle, could be made only by Saddam personally," Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of Desert Storm, wrote in his postwar memoirs, "It Doesn't Take a Hero.". But the penalty for failure in the Iraqi army, and in Iraqi politics, is “they carry you out feet first,” this official noted. A sandwich improves every hike, and in L.A., you can almost always find one not far from the other. “They are too rigid, too slow to react.”. On 7 August, after receiving a request for assistance from the Saudi government, President Bush ordered deployment of … The Iraqi defensive strategy, however, was not prepared for the Coalition's offensive strategy. Hussein’s insistence on total allegiance also reaches down to the lowest levels of his troops. Some independent brigades were operating under corps control. “And a lot is generic Soviet-Chinese kinds of stuff.”. “It’s their chief industry. Shafaq News / It is known that Iraq's land has embraced some of the oldest civilizations known to mankind, as well as the first armies formed hundreds of years B.C. Once the ground war began, the Republican Guard was the primary target. As time drags on, the Iraqi army will be most vulnerable to thinking about the last war Saddam Hussein dragged them into, how much it cost, how many lives were lost, how much it cost their families.”, Cordesman noted that most of Hussein’s troops have spent their entire adult lives in war. “Saddam is both feared and admired,” said a senior U.S. analyst. At Hindiyah, 3rd Infantry Division troops clashed with another Guards unit, the Nebuchadnezzar Brigade, defending the town and a key bridge over the Euphrates River. U.S. spokesmen say no Iraqi military aircraft have been seen in the air this time.