fugate@buckaroo.sw.mcc.com (Bryan Fugate) (01/07/91)
From: milano!fugate@buckaroo.sw.mcc.com (Bryan Fugate) On July 5, 1943, the German Army launched an ill-fated offensive towards Kursk in southern Russia near the Ukraine. There were several notable features to this attack including the fact that it was and remains the largest tank battle ever fought and it represented the last major offensive carried out by the German Army on the Eastern Front. After Kursk, the Wehrmacht was reduced to defending ever more static positions with ever dwindling resources. The parallels that exist today between Kursk and Kuwait are rather interesting. In the case of Kursk, the Russians knew the Germans were going to attack the salient months in advance and had ample opportunity to prepare a multi-echeloned defense in depth. The final piece of information was provided by a German deserter who crossed lines a couple of days before the offensive; the Russians had positive intelligence that the attack would occur at 1500 hours in the afternoon of July 5. Given this intelligence, plus the fact that they were operating from well prepared positions, the Russians were able to turn the battle into a disastrous defeat for the Wehrmacht. The way in which they did this was quite instructive. The Russians waited until the German units were moved into their jump-off positions; when their tanks and fuel trucks were in the assembly areas and when their troops were being loaded into vehicles for the offensive. At approximately 2230 hours on the 4th the Russians fired a massive artillery barrage from 600 guns into the German staging areas causing them substantial causualties and throwing their entire logistics and battle plans into confusion. As a result, the German attack was delayed several hours and their well laid plans began with a stumbling start. The Russian barrage in and of itself did not determine victory at Kursk but it served to take away the initiative from the attackers and momentum from the very start was in the hands of the defenders. Since the battle of Kursk, a prepratory fire into the enemy's offensive staging areas has become an accepted part of Soviet military doctrine. In Russian it is called 'kontrpodgotovka' or disruptive fire. An explanation of this tactic can be found in John Erickson's work 'The Road to Berlin.' We must assume that the Iraqi army is well versed in Soviet military doctrine and that it will do all it can to take away the initiave from the attackers much in the way the Russians did at Kursk. How might this be done? Now that Saddam Hussein and his generals have had months to contemplate a strategic defense, the following scenario has become quite plausible. A salvo of Scud missles could be fired with relatively short notice against U.S. air and helicopter forces that were being fueled and readied for an offensive strike against Iraq/Kuwait. Perhaps as many as 75 of these missiles could be salvoed leaving U.S. and Allied forces with as little as 6 minutes warning before impact. The 1,400lb high explosive warheads on the Scuds could be packed with nothing more sophisticated than ball bearings and fused to detonate at, say, 500ft altititude. Even though the CEP (Circular Error Probability) of the Scud may be 3,000 to 9,000ft, if all 75 of them were targeted towards ten chopper or fighter bomber massing areas then, no doubt, serious damage would be inflicted on the Coalition forces. The missles' range of between 390 and 540 miles should be adequate to cover most important targets. This is particulary true now that the 'Camellot' airbase has been opened closer to the Iraqi border. This new base contains several hundred U.S. first-line F-15's and F-16's. This scenario assumes that Iraqi intelligence could reliably determine the date and time of the attack and schedule their Scud fires in a timely fashion to catch the Coalition forces at a most extremely vulnerable moment. We should not doubt that Iraq has the intelligence resources capable of making that determination. It also assumes that the Patriot anti-missile defense system (untested in combat) would be largely ineffective against a massed salvo of ballistic missiles fired by the Iraqis. The point is that we must not assume that Saddam Hussein and his troops are going to sit in their trenches and bunkers waiting for us to throw the first punch. History teaches us that they will try put us at an extreme disadvantage by a surprise assault a short time before we are fully ready. As a second part of the scenario, immediately after the shock attack against the Coalition Air Forces, the Iraqis might try a massive tank attack against some lightly armored ground force in the desert. A good choice for this might be against the 50,000 U.S. marines forward deployed near the Kuwaiti border. Other candidates for this might be the 82nd or the 101st Airborne Divisions. If the Iraqis could cut off a large American force and intermingle with them in a vast melee (a la Kursk once again) then even when U.S. airpower was able to swing back into action, it might be too late to avoid signigicant losses for the Coalition. A third part of the scenario assumes that the Iraqi Air Force might try a surge attack against one or two U.S. carriers either in the Persian Gulf or beyond the straights. This could be done by launching a mass suicide or one-way mission by as many as 250 fighters, up to 40 of which could be armed with Exocet cruise missiles. It is very likely that enough of the planes could get through to cause heavy damage to or even sink the carriers. The surviving Iraqi planes then might land either in Iran or Oman with some maybe making it to Yemen. It is even possible that they might ditch in the open sea and be picked up by Iraqi tankers and freighters loitering in pre-selected positions. Once these scenarios are taken seriously, what then might we do to lessen the danger for our forces? In the first place, giving the enemy plenty of advance warning and, worst of all, perhaps even an openly published schedule for attack, we should begin immediately by bulding up uncertainty about our timetable. Within as few days as possible, we should begin flying massive sorties up to the Kuwait and Iraqi borders with fully loaded aircraft. These flights should be fully war loaded and give the appearance of vectoring in for a real attack before veering away at the last minute. Several of these flights should take place over a period of days or weeks at all hours of the day and night. These maneuvers would have the effect of taking the starch out of the Iraqi Air Force, putting them constantly on edge and degrading their overall readiness posture especially since they have no reliable way to get spare parts. Each flight commander should be given a sealed envelope with a go-no-go order. This order should be given verbally to the pilots only moments before the takeoff. The final attack order, then, could not be reliably predicted by the Iraqis. The decision on the final date should be made by the President and the Joint Chiefs and communicated to no one else save through the sealed envelopes right before the decisive flight. In this way, we might be able to prevent a huge American defeat on the scale of Pearl Harbor or Corregidor. If we sit back with the assumption that we alone are going to determine when the first blow will be landed, indeed the entire course of the conflict, then we are making a very serious mistake. We must remember that we are facing a cornered rat who has shown himself to be extremely clever as well as violent and unpredictable. Staging a number of massed false sorties against Iraq/Kuwait will be hard work and absorb much time, labor and money. But, the large task we have set out for ourselves will not be accomplished easily. There is an old Turkish proverb that we should consider: "If your enemy be only a man, think of him as an elephant." (by Bryan Fugate, author of 'Operation Barbarossa: Strategy and Tactics on the Eastern Front, 1941)