I love how to try to capitalize ACTUAL ...
Which Pollack are you speaking of this time? :lol:
And no, I'm not saying Pollack's book is worthless, I am saying it is myopic. Even myopic scholarly works are of use as they can sometimes give you more understanding of their narrow subject than a work that takes the opposing view.
Which would have ... unprotected was a bad idea.
They didn't know that US GPS technology allowed them to traverse the desert. They believed the desert was a natural protection of their flank because their technology didn't allow them to navigate it. They had no concept of the US technological capabilities.
Why do you think Iraq didn't consider American technology? ... bad case of incompetence.
Because few people knew about it in 1991. GPS was a rather young technology, and had never been used to coordinate mass troop movements.
Alright, I'll give you credit ... situation to their superiors.
Again you fail to grasp what the Iraqis faced when the shooting started. For one, they had sustained a month of aerial bombardment before the attack began, and the initial engagements largely had the Iraqis blind as to the source of the attack. Plus communications had been disrupted by that aerial bombardment AND because of the wrong assumption of a safe place, most of the tank teams were not in their tanks at the start of the engagement. As Biddle explains in his paper, the losses were a combination of false assumptions by the Iraqis of the US military capabilities, and their false assumptions created disadvantages that superior US technology enabled US forces to exploit dramatically.
Again, the 52nd Brigade provides a perfect example.
"Late on 24 February,...
I'm not arguing that Iraqis didn't make mistakes, quite the opposite, I am saying that the technology employed by the US forces allowed them to exploit the mistakes of the Iraq forces.
The Iraqi defenses were also built around the assumption that the US would largely be firing HEAT rounds, and that their sand berms to largely detonate the HEAT, saving the tank behind it. The US forces reported that the APDS rounds that they were firing slid through the protective berm like it wasn't there, passed through the tank behind it, and kept on going.
You are arguing in a vacuum. You want to argue that the Iraqis broke quickly and surrendered, but can't admit that the reason they broke so quickly was because of the air power superiority that pounded them for weeks before the invasion and the clearly overmatched equipment they had to fight with.
AND, it should be pointed out, the US air superiority was itself achieved through a huge technological gap, with many of the sorties to destroy Iraqi air defenses coming from stealth aircraft that the Iraqis couldn't properly track.
Bombing from planes they couldn't detect, attacks from directions they didn't think possible, AP rounds that easily defeated their armor from ranges they didn't think possible, unrelenting bombing that they could do nothing about... but yeah, it was really just the discipline of US troops that caused the Iraqis to break, right? :roll:
All across the KTO Iraqi forces completely fell apart upon contact with Coalition forces ... significant damage to Coalition forces.
See above. They had been subjected to bombing for weeks that they couldn't defend against, and encountered military weaponry doing things they didn't think were possible. Yeah, they broke. Most were broken by the air campaign before the US troops even arrived.
A friend of mine who was a tank commander in the Gulf War said that the most common request of those surrendering was to stop the "steel rain", referring to the cluster bombs and MLRS that the US used to soften targets before approach.
One last point, and more just as an offering to a fellow avid military reader, is this story that will stick with me from the same tank commander. Just a short observation of his:
His platoon was one of the first to arrive on the scene of what would become known as the "highway of death", Highway 80 leaving Kuwait city after US air power destroyed the retreating Iraqi forces. The thing he said will stick with him forever was the smell. When he said that I was thinking he was going to say something about burning oil, charred meat, or "death", etc. but he just chuckled and said "No, man, it smelled like the perfume counter at Macy's" ... apparently among the stolen goods that the Iraqis were trying to flee with were numerous crates of expensive perfume, which covered everything on the scene. He said it was the must surreal experience of the whole war for him. His eyes and his nose were in different realities.
