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U.S. Forces Likely To Achieve Swift Military Victory in Iraq, says SAIS Military Expert
By Geraldine Sealey, Spring 2003 IRP Fellow
Washington - January 29, 2003. The massive United States military force poised to invade Iraq will wield even more lethal force and boast more organized and agile troops than during the first Gulf War, a prominent military historian said today.
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Eliot Cohen talks to IRP Fellows about a possible invasion of Iraq by U.S. forces. |
The advances in the U.S. military in the last decade combined with the weakening of Iraqi military assets make the two forces an "utter mismatch," said Eliot Cohen, professor and director of strategic studies at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of the Johns Hopkins University.
President Bush made clear in his State of the Union address that he is "pretty doggone determined" to topple the Iraqi dictator, Cohen said, speaking to journalists in the International Reporting Project a day after the president's speech to Congress. Unless Hussein is ousted in a coup or flees Iraq into exile, Cohen said, a U.S. military invasion of Iraq seems likely and a U.S. victory nearly inevitable.
Although Cohen noted a handful of "equalizers," such as weapons of mass destruction, that could pose problems for a U.S. military operation, he said the Pentagon is more than equipped to handily defeat Hussein's forces. The Iraqi defense budget is the equivalent of one-third of 1 percent of the U.S. defense budget, for example. And the Iraqi inventory of military equipment reflects this relative dearth of resources. Hussein now possesses about half the tanks he had during the 1991 Gulf war, and many are 1950s-era Soviet technology. Half of Hussein's equipment lacks spare parts, critical for fast fixes during combat, he said.
The U.S. military, on the other hand, has virtually all precision-guided equipment, much of it controlled by GPS-technology. "Even malfunctions will be more accurate now," Cohen said. Command and control is better and troops are better organized and more agile than they were 12 years ago for the first Gulf war, Cohen said. Military officers also think differently about operations, with a more sophisticated approach to targeting. The U.S. military has seen more action since 1991 than in the years before the first war with Iraq, Cohen added. US armed forces have been working around the globe for much of the last decade, with deployments to places like Somalia, Kosovo and Afghanistan.
Despite the obvious mismatch in military force, however, Cohen noted some wild cards. It remains to be seen how determined Iraqi soldiers are to fight. By many accounts, morale in the Iraqi military is so low, Hussein's troops may surrender immediately and embrace the U.S. invaders, Cohen said. Hussein's weapons of mass destruction are also an issue, although it is unclear whether the dictator will have the ability to deploy biological and chemical weapons against U.S. troops. Indications are that Iraq does not yet have nuclear weapons.
Cohen said he expects some "information warfare" from the U.S. military, spreading the word among Iraqi soldiers that if they pull the trigger on chemical and biological weapons, they would be considered war criminals. That Hussein's is an unpopular regime bodes well for the United States, but Cohen warned that the U.S. military invasion of Iraq would not necessarily be a "cakewalk." He would not estimate how long he thought it would take to topple Hussein.
Cohen did have a warning for the journalists in the room: Mind your facts. "War and war reporting breed bogus numbers," he said, pointing to a recent published estimate that an Iraqi invasion could leave 500,000 civilian casualties. "What's the arithmetic?" Cohen said. "It's just ludicrous."
Copyright © 2005 International Reporting Project. All Rights Reserved.