OPPOSING FORCES. The Iraqi Armed Forces

OPPOSING FORCES

The Iraqi Armed Forces

On paper the Iraqi Armed forces were impressive, they could field over 1 million men making them the 4th largest Army in the world. But this was misleading, as the War was later to show. The Army had not fully recovered from the Iran/Iraq war; many units were undermanned and desperately short of technicians. The reserves where badly trained and the Army had suffered from purges of its command (those who fell out of favor with Sadam normally had fatal helicopter accidents) it is also highly centralized a feature of dictatorships which made it very vulnerable. Out of 60 Divisions 9 were armored and 5 mechanized, (2 of each being Republican Guard .Two Elite formations also existed, Special Forces and Naval infantry. Crucially both the Army and the Air force lacked the ability to fight at night and their marksmanship was poor. Milan anti tank weapon strike rates were about 1 in 6, Sagger (Soviet Anti tank weapon) were about 1 in 20!

Although the Iraqis had about 5500 tanks 90% were designed over 30 years ago and were nearly harmless to a modern MBT. Tank gunnery was also poor. The most modern was an unarmored T-72 whose autoloader could grab a gunner's finger if they were a bit slow. Artillery was good being South African 155mm based on the designs of Dr Gerald Bull (Dr Bull was killed Mar 1990 probably by Israeli Secret Service).

Anti Aircraft ability was poor except for the Russian made ZSU-23-4, which made low level flying dangerous. The Air force was large but their best planes were Mirage F-1's and MIG 29's the later had been delivered without the look down shoot down radar.

The Iraqi forces did have large stocks of chemical weapons and had used them in combat in the previous war; their possible use was a great concern to the Coalition Commanders. By the time the War started the Iraqis had around 400,000 men on the front line, 150,000 in Kuwait alone.

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