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I was unlucky enough to be in both Desert Storm as an infantryman and OIF 1 as a pilot. In my experience what most overlook is the discipline and overall human quality of a western army over a west Asia army. Iraq had the 4th largest army on the planet and top tier Soviet equipment in 1991, and we went through them like shit through a goose. Mostly because of devastating air power. There was less of a prep for OIF but more higher level leaders had been in Iraq the first go around. Remember during DS most of the generals were Vietnam vets. As a side note I was opconed to 3rd ID with an infantry BCT from the 101st ABN. 3rd ID absolutely laid waste to everything. I’m a light infantry/airborne guy at heart, but watching a mechanized division go to work from a helicopter pilots point of view was awesome to say the least. I think only the Russians or Chinese could stop something like that. Problem is it takes a month to get that kinda unit into place.

Great read as usual!

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Mar 12Author

Air is rightly emphasized for the US's military edge, but that makes it easy to overlook the qualitative difference in basic combined arms!

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Agreed.

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Guys, good questions, but Ben has undertaken a challenging task here and worked through it in my opinion brilliantly. Very hard to make these kinds of comparisons and decide what variables can be controlled and which must be adjusted to make the initially apples-v-oranges contrast a workable apples-v-apples comparison, without creating incoherent scenarios. He bent factors in favor of the defense but found that nonetheless, modern offensive forces and op-art would prevail. This is an excellent hypothesis that bears more serious testing.

That requires wargaming. The appropriate tool is "Gulf Strike" (Mark Herman, Victory Games, 1983), ideally the 3rd ed. (later release, a bit expensive these days). That one modelled a Soviet invasion of Iran, later expanded to include Iran-Iraq and Desert Shield, developed for Andy Marshall at DoD/ONA.

Then test it to ensure it accurately replicates both the Iran-Iraq War (firepower-attritional sludge match) and the maneuver-warfare blitz during the 1990-91 Gulf War. Then amend it to reflect the situation and forces employed during the 2003 invasion. One would have to modify the forces and create unit counters, but that's all part of serious analysis.

We'd have to review the adjustments for suitability, judgment being required in any such work. Remember that Ben's deeper purpose here is to explore the narrative that in contemporary/future land warfare, advantage has slipped back toward the defensive side for the first time since 1939. He rightly questions that premature proposition, and approaches it with an excellent case-study research design. I think we all can agree that that the proposition warrants hard analysis, and his hypothesis development effort above providesis an excellent first step toward scientific testing.

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Mar 9Author

Thanks Tim, excellent summation - I really hope that others explore this problem in the kind of detail that can't be done in 4000 words. I worry that specific technologies (e.g. drones) and specific scenarios (e.g. Taiwan/Pacific) distract us from more general problems of operational mobility that will always be with us.

Those look like excellent resources for thinking about this, will check them out.

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(Banned)Mar 5
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Mar 5Author

Please read to understanding before snarking, thank you.

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I did read and I did understand. Those two things were what prompted the comment. If you'd like it to be less snarky, then let me put it this way: your analysis attempts to overfit innovations in technology into a story that had nothing to do with that technology and thus fails both as history and as analysis.

There, how was that?

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Isn't this an apples and oranges comparison? Ukraine is the first near-peer war we've had probably since the Iran-Iraq war. Of course it's going to be more likely to be static, less likely to be dynamic. I'm not sure it's about the technology. Mearsheimer did a good piece recently on the myth of blitzkrieg, how it's worked exactly once in a peer conflict.

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Mar 4Author

Hence the assumptions weighted in the Iraqis favor. The question isn't even whether blitzkrieg is possible, but operational mobility.

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Fair point sir.

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