You can be a lackluster force and still capture territory. If you don't understand that I can't help you.
Except the Ukrainian forces mentioning the limited fortifications.
American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan were also thousands of miles from home, smaller in number (ISAF struggled to surpass 125,000), with fewer tanks and artillery. We can do this all day.
This is something you just keep claiming with no real proof of it.
What are you basing that off of?
No, it did not "as a whole" improve at all.
What changed was the Iraqi General staff came to fully appreciate just how utterly poor their troops were at conducting operations, and "fixed this" by scripting offensives down to the platoon level. There was no real improvement in the skill-at-arms of actual Iraqi formations.
If you are going to claim a military is “trash” or “garbage”, and they continue to capture significant objectives despite the opposition investing substantial amounts of time and resources in defending them, then the narrative does not hold up.
For example:
“The attack on al-Faw was preceded by Iraqi diversionary attacks in northern Iraq, with a massive artillery and air barrage of Iranian front lines.
Key areas, such as supply lines, command posts, and ammunition depots, were hit by a storm of mustard gas and nerve gas, as well as by conventional explosives. Helicopters landed Iraqi commandos behind Iranian lines while the main Iraqi force attacked in a frontal assault. Within 48 hours, all of the Iranian forces had been killed or cleared from the al-Faw Peninsula.[43] The day was celebrated in Iraq as Faw Liberation Day throughout Saddam's rule.
The Iraqis had planned the offensive well. Prior to the attack the Iraqi soldiers gave themselves poison gas antidotes to shield themselves from the effect of the saturation of gas.
The heavy and well executed use of chemical weapons was the decisive factor in the Iraqi victory.[101] Iraqi losses were a little more than 1,000.[39]
To the shock of the Iranians, rather than breaking off the offensive, the Iraqis kept up their drive, and a new force attacked the Iranian positions around Basra.[20] Following this, sensing Iranian weakness, the Iraqis launched a sustained drive to clear the Iranians out of all of southern Iraq.[26]:264
One of the most successful Iraqi tactics was the "one-two punch" attack using chemical weapons.
Using artillery, they would saturate the Iranian front line with rapidly dispersing cyanide and nerve gas, while longer-lasting mustard gas was launched via fighter-bombers and rockets against the Iranian rear, creating a "chemical wall" that blocked reinforcement.”
en.wikipedia.org
Except, again, their performance during the Tawakal ala Allah operations strongly contradicts that.
US troops struggled just as badly during past operations in Mexico and the Caribbean, so claiming that it was simply a matter of being far away clearly doesn’t hold up either. They were also facing enemies that didn’t have any tanks, which makes the “fewer tanks” argument hold little water.
The US will to fight in Somalia was broken after taking fewer than twenty KIA in a single operation
www.bbc.com
