We had an interesting discussion over dinner. Is Baghdad one big trap for the US troops?
Yes it is. Saddam will let the US get to somewhere around 50 miles away from Baghdad, where the US supply lines are stretched out a bit thin. At the same time, Saddam, rather than defending a long line, is defending a short line, as encirclement makes the line of conflict smaller, putting more Iraqi troops in a smaller area. At a certain point, Iraqi soldiers will be quite close to each other, physically.
Based on the current disposition of troops, the Iraqi army can still fight like furies and potentially escape out the back of Baghdad, running away East towards Iran and the hills.
Historically, this is like the Falaise Gap in WWII. Patton and Montgomery had the German 5th Army caught in a bubble. The Allies slaughtered thousands of German soldiers trying to escape through a five-mile gap in defenses south of the town of Falaise, held by the Canadian First Army. It took two days, but we closed the Falaise Gap, catching more than 10,000 German prisoners in the pocket and killing an estimated 20,000 more.
So, how to pin down the Iraqi Army? The 4th Mechanized has to come ashore in Turkey, unload their tanks, gas’em up and get rolling into the north of Iraq as fast as possible. In the meantime, the airspace north and east of Baghdad should be full of aircraft. Until you get feet on the sand, keep the escape route full of all kinds of exploding iron.
The doctrine for this is the Viet Nam era, Linebacker and Linebacker II campaigns, where the B-52’s ran around the the clock from as far away as Japan and Guam, pounding Ha Noi with good, dumb, cheap, effective, iron bombs. If anything in Ha Noi moved during Linebacker, the US dropped lots of bombs on it, day or night for two weeks.
Do the same thing north and east of Baghdad until you can get troops in there to physically close the line. It might take a week to twelve days for US troops to get there, but the idea is to have the Iraqi Army caught against the US troops on three sides.
Their only escape route should be full of angry, well-armed pilots, aviators and helicopter gunfighters who can call up all kinds of bad for tanks, trucks, missiles and foot soldiers, like the Highway of Death in the first Gulf War. This effectively closes the only escape for the Iraqi Army. In that little pause that you give them, you can also fill in some gaps in your supply lines.
A sensible leader would then surrender. An insane leader will invite a house to house fight. Back our guys about three kilometers from the front lines and start bombing anything left standing in the city. You can’t win a house to house fight, so make all the houses go away. Stop every three days and ask ‘Enough?’.
This is going to get me in trouble, but stop screwing around with the humanitarian aid. The logistical aim should only be keeping the front line supplied with gas, groceries and guns. If we’ve got some slack time, we’ll do some humanitarian shipping, but frankly Scarlett, too damn bad until they surrender.
RoadDave 