Info: Great Tank Battles & Lessons Learned

[Aeraaa]

Originally Posted by shahadi

True. And sometimes we learn from the mistakes or miscues of the adversary. Here, when McMaster crested a ridge and saw what laid before him, well we all know what he did with his troop, his 9 M1A1s and Bradleys. But, what is striking here and instrumental, is the Iraqi commander failing, this is especially galling given Iraq tank crews had spent 8 years in a slug fest with Iran, that he failed to put somebody on that very same ridge to surveil the area in front of his force. Since, he had not detailed his scouts in such a manner, he got jumped by an audacious McMaster, who "took his head off and handed him his hat."

Unfortunately for the Iraqi commmander, his experience in Iran-Iraq War meant nothing (and probably was detrimental to him). The reason is that this war, for many reasons, quickly evovled into a war closely resembling WW1 but with better gear. Tactics also were similar in many cases. Tanks were used as static direct fire artillery, artillery itself could not fire at targets other than predetermined ones, vast networks of trenches covered the battlefield etc. These worked against the poorly equipped Iranians (barely), but against one of the two leading superpowers, trained to fight a high intensity mechanized war in Europe, tactics like these were suicidal.
In addition to that, Iraqis had problems with conducting proper reconnaisance even against Iranians. Which is interesting, given that the former had significant equipment (and later manpower) advantage over the latter. In the Iranian counteroffensives of 1982 they managed to bypass and eventually destroy large detachments of Iraqi troops, since the latter even failed to conduct proper patrolling. It is intersting that the army that had the clear advantage in mechanized assets was the more static one as well.
All these combined to give the eventual outcome of the battle and the Gulf War in general.