“Modern” armies have 0 ground skills, this is why they always get their asses kicked in ground invasions and have to rely completely on bombing campaigns.
That was mostly an air campaign against a disorganized Iraqi army across the flattest, most open, terrain imaginable. If anything, NATO countries learned the wrong lessons from Iraq because recent conflicts point to air power being insufficient to destroy the enemy if there’s cities or other terrain to fight over.
Most of the Iraqi army didn’t fight at all. Their commanders were heftily bribed beforehand by the Americans. For all intents and purposes the US didn’t even fight a real war, they were faced with an opponent that largely didn’t fight back or even turned on their own. It is however indicative of how a real war would have gone that the few Iraqi units that did fight and put up resistance by all accounts caused a huge amount of problems for the American units that were supposed to just steamroll over them, and almost threw their entire plan into disarray.
This “war” also followed a decade of strangulating sanctions on the heels of another war intentionally provoked by the West in which the Iraqi forces were badly mauled when the US persuaded Iraq to retreat out of Kuwait with the promise that they wouldn’t engage the retreating troops but proceeded to bomb the shit out of them anyway. And this after Iraq had already been fighting a devastating years long conflict against Iran, instigated by the Americans and fueled by European and American weapons for the specific purpose of weakening both countries.
So yeah, it’s easy fighting a crippled nation that doesn’t put up a fight, it’s different when you are faced with an enemy that actually fights back as they learned in Vietnam and Afghanistan, no matter how technologically superior you think you are.
They also got lucky that sectarian violence amongst groups (incited by the US) took a lot of the heat off them. If they had united, it may have very well been different. You need a national liberation struggle to unite people for this reason.
Kind of reminds me of how the Nazis rolled over a France riven with sectarian fighting so they concluded that kicking in the door with a tank spearhead would always make the whole house fall down. That, and a deep-rooted racism, made the Germans utterly unprepared for the USSR fighting tooth and nail the whole way.
TBH, the main reason for France’s defeat wasn’t sectarian fighting, it was that Allied command literally sent better half of their army straight into the trap, expecting Germans to repeat 1914. And then they were encircled and crushed.
it’s a very nazi type of idiocy to loudly shout for 10-20 years that you’ll murder every slav from poland to the pacific, and then get caught with your pants down when they really really dont want that to happen.
meanwhile, most of the french could expect life to more or less go on under nazi rule. they could afford to surrender.
They had no air force, their artillery were stilling ducks if they fired a single shot (between the AWACS and Counter Battery units attached to the Armored Cavalry) and the goal wasn’t to pacify an entire country’s worth of population it was to 1) fight any organized military resistance and 2) capture Baghdad.
(Unpopular statement incoming) I was with the invasion forces and at that time, most of the forward combat units actually were making an effort to limit civilian casualties and not damage critical infrastructure and places where civilians would be congregating even if there was a decent chance that they were being used by Iraqi military forces.
Most places weren’t all that well defended. Any cities that had dug in troops were bypassed if it looked like it was going to take too long and mess up the time tables to “get to Baghdad”.
It wasn’t until the invasion was “over” and the occupation started that shit quickly hit the fan.
“Modern” armies have 0 ground skills, this is why they always get their asses kicked in ground invasions and have to rely completely on bombing campaigns.
Iraq war? (2003 US invasion of Iraq)
2003 invasion of Iraq ended in total US occupation of Iraq after just a bit more than 1 month of fighting.
That was mostly an air campaign against a disorganized Iraqi army across the flattest, most open, terrain imaginable. If anything, NATO countries learned the wrong lessons from Iraq because recent conflicts point to air power being insufficient to destroy the enemy if there’s cities or other terrain to fight over.
Most of the Iraqi army didn’t fight at all. Their commanders were heftily bribed beforehand by the Americans. For all intents and purposes the US didn’t even fight a real war, they were faced with an opponent that largely didn’t fight back or even turned on their own. It is however indicative of how a real war would have gone that the few Iraqi units that did fight and put up resistance by all accounts caused a huge amount of problems for the American units that were supposed to just steamroll over them, and almost threw their entire plan into disarray.
This “war” also followed a decade of strangulating sanctions on the heels of another war intentionally provoked by the West in which the Iraqi forces were badly mauled when the US persuaded Iraq to retreat out of Kuwait with the promise that they wouldn’t engage the retreating troops but proceeded to bomb the shit out of them anyway. And this after Iraq had already been fighting a devastating years long conflict against Iran, instigated by the Americans and fueled by European and American weapons for the specific purpose of weakening both countries.
So yeah, it’s easy fighting a crippled nation that doesn’t put up a fight, it’s different when you are faced with an enemy that actually fights back as they learned in Vietnam and Afghanistan, no matter how technologically superior you think you are.
They also got lucky that sectarian violence amongst groups (incited by the US) took a lot of the heat off them. If they had united, it may have very well been different. You need a national liberation struggle to unite people for this reason.
Kind of reminds me of how the Nazis rolled over a France riven with sectarian fighting so they concluded that kicking in the door with a tank spearhead would always make the whole house fall down. That, and a deep-rooted racism, made the Germans utterly unprepared for the USSR fighting tooth and nail the whole way.
TBH, the main reason for France’s defeat wasn’t sectarian fighting, it was that Allied command literally sent better half of their army straight into the trap, expecting Germans to repeat 1914. And then they were encircled and crushed.
it’s a very nazi type of idiocy to loudly shout for 10-20 years that you’ll murder every slav from poland to the pacific, and then get caught with your pants down when they really really dont want that to happen.
meanwhile, most of the french could expect life to more or less go on under nazi rule. they could afford to surrender.
Also bribes to surrender!
They had no air force, their artillery were stilling ducks if they fired a single shot (between the AWACS and Counter Battery units attached to the Armored Cavalry) and the goal wasn’t to pacify an entire country’s worth of population it was to 1) fight any organized military resistance and 2) capture Baghdad.
(Unpopular statement incoming) I was with the invasion forces and at that time, most of the forward combat units actually were making an effort to limit civilian casualties and not damage critical infrastructure and places where civilians would be congregating even if there was a decent chance that they were being used by Iraqi military forces.
Most places weren’t all that well defended. Any cities that had dug in troops were bypassed if it looked like it was going to take too long and mess up the time tables to “get to Baghdad”.
It wasn’t until the invasion was “over” and the occupation started that shit quickly hit the fan.
But what happened after? Remember the Iraqi resistance?