Iraq: A new kind of war

Iraq: A new kind of war

By Jonathan Marcus BBC defence correspondent

The move on Baghdad will be studied for years to come

"Forget the last Gulf War", I was told back in March by one senior British commander. "Forget everything that you have read in the history books about modern combat", he went on, "this is going to be different".

This has been a dramatically new kind of warfare. It was not quite the "shock and awe" that the United States military had promised in the weeks leading up to the campaign.

That is in part because the British prevailed upon the Americans to scale down some of the destructive power, perhaps realising that the Iraqi regime and its military were far weaker than many had imagined.

Nobody could have known how the Iraq military machine would perform in this war.

On paper at least it looked like a credible force. There was, of course, no doubt it would be beaten.

But how long would it take? Just how much resistance would key units like the Republican Guard put up? And what sort of cost would it impose on the invading US and British forces?

'Hollow force'

Now we know at least some of the answers. The Iraqi military was essentially a hollow force, weakened by years of sanctions.

The regime it served was equally hollow; most Iraqis seem to have shed few tears at its passing.

But even by its own standards the Iraqi military put up a very bad fight.

Most bridges were not blown ahead of the advancing US and British forces.

Armoured formations were thrown into battle piecemeal; there was little of the Soviet-style defence in depth that Republican Guard divisions demonstrated in the last Gulf conflict.

The Iraqi regime crumbled

The speed and tempo of the US war plan also confounded any attempts by the Iraqis to mount an organised resistance.

We do not yet know who was killed in that first strike on 19 March by US F-117 fighters on an Iraqi command bunker.

But it set the scene for the whole campaign. Iraqi command and control was knocked off balance at the very start of the war and never recovered.

This was testimony to the ability of US air power to precisely target command and communications at all levels. The nervous system binding the Iraqi military together simply fell apart.

The US advance on Baghdad in terms of its speed of movement and complex logistical support will be studied in the war colleges for many years to come.

But it came against very limited opposition. Some Iraqi units may have been destroyed; but many more simply collapsed from within, their soldiers drifting away, abandoning their equipment.

Large parts of the Iraqi regular may never even have entered combat.

Failed strategy

Even Saddam Hussein's so-called "urban strategy" - the attempt to draw US and British forces into cities where they would come under harrowing attacks from irregular fighters - did little to alter the course of this war.

The Americans insisted all along that the war was "on plan" as they put it. And in broad terms this assertion was probably correct.

There was that one famous moment of wobble, early on in the campaign, when a combination of vicious sandstorms, resistance from irregular Iraqi fighters, and an apparent "pause" in US operations prompted a full-scale assault on the US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld from a cohort of retired US generals in Washington and the leafier suburbs of Virginia.

More manpower is needed to deter looters

But there was no real pause and US operations were not stalled. The irregular Iraqi resistance was greater than expected but possible to deal with.

The armchair generals - many of the ex-US Army - were fighting for the legacy of this war.

Mr Rumsfeld saw this as the showcase for the new transformed US military that he is trying to shape; a force dominated by air power and precision weaponry, bolstered by new information gathering and distribution systems that will allow much smaller, lighter ground forces to take on ever larger enemy formations.

The central role of the US Marine Corps in this campaign was instructive; a relatively light, but highly mobile force that could deploy to the region with speed.

'Too few troops'

The armchair generals said that the Americans had too few troops on the ground.

In combat terms they were proved decisively wrong.

More manpower will be needed for enforcing stability and peace-keeping.

But even here there should be no rush to judgement. Within a few weeks there may be good deal more order than many people imagined.

But there will be other clear lessons from this war. The down-side of precision-guided weaponry is the significant proportion of British and US casualties killed by their own side, so-called friendly fire.

There was little opposition even in Saddam Hussein's hometown Tikrit

This puts the onus on developing new combat identification systems; a task that to some extent stalled in the aftermath of the last Gulf War.

This will have to be taken up with added urgency.

Intelligence gathering also has a long way to go. Information is at the centre of modern warfare. There can be no precision-revolution without accurate targeting information.

Just how good US intelligence and hence the targeting was we simply do not know. Who really is underneath the rubble of all of the command bunkers that were hit?

Forget "shock and awe", but remember "effects-based warfare".

This was its first true outing - the idea of using military power in graduated ways, not simply to destroy other military formations, but to use fire-power, propaganda, information, precision-strike to achieve a very precise effect - the collapse of the Iraqi regime.

In less than a month that has been achieved. What matters now is how far the Iraqis themselves will be able to shape their future destiny.