Best strategy for taking Baghdad

[Darth Wong]

Not to be a stick in the mud, but all of these mass-destruction and carpet-bombing techniques would win the war but not the peace. It would be interesting if people actually gave serious thought to the original question.

[phongn]

Not to be a stick in the mud, but all of these mass-destruction and carpet-bombing techniques would win the war but not the peace. It would be interesting if people actually gave serious thought to the original question.

You were the one who asked for an ion cannon

Seriously, I have no real idea how best go take Baghdad, though.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

It seems to me that if Saddam doesn't screw up, our forces might find themselves in a situation where we can't planes, tanks, choppers or artillery. House to house fighting could very well go badly. Although our troops are much better trained, some guy bursting out of a kitchen with an AK-47 could cause multiple casualties. I'm not convined our troops will be able to inflict 100 to 1 casualties like we're used to. Do we have any nice toys deployed out there I'm unaware of that will help mitigate this situation?

[phongn]

It seems to me that if Saddam doesn't screw up, our forces might find themselves in a situation where we can't planes, tanks, choppers or artillery. House to house fighting could very well go badly. Although our troops are much better trained, some guy bursting out of a kitchen with an AK-47 could cause multiple casualties. I'm not convined our troops will be able to inflict 100 to 1 casualties like we're used to. Do we have any nice toys deployed out there I'm unaware of that will help mitigate this situation?

IIRC, MOUT does involving using airstrikes and artillery and other fun toys to reduce strong points as we move in. Unfortunately, that will result in quite a few civilian casualties.

[Sea Skimmer]

Not to be a stick in the mud, but all of these mass-destruction and carpet-bombing techniques would win the war but not the peace. It would be interesting if people actually gave serious thought to the original question.

Orbital ion cannon

You first.

[Vympel]

If you want to take a city that's held by determined defenders, then you need firepower- at the level of blowing a building to smithereens if resistance comes your way from one. It won't be pretty. A siege will take a very long time- and Sun Tzu said it's a bad idea.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Sieges and blowing shit up are out. The civilian casualties would be unacceptable, and the siege would take too long anyway.

[Vympel]

Sieges and blowing shit up are out. The civilian casualties would be unacceptable, and the siege would take too long anyway.

Then they go in there with just small arms and cop massive casualties: IF the Iraqis fight back.

[SirNitram]

While I would love the orbital ion cannon(It's not a WMD: It's effects are clearly observed to be both incredibly tactical, very precise, and with almost zero bleedthrough.), more realistic ideas must be considered. Lighter munitions may be better: If we can get lasers to tag enemy armour in the city, we can try surgical removal of those first. Without armour, the troops are going to have a much tougher time holding off any serious push. That's not to say they won't be able to.. Indeed, urban warfare is hell for tanks. However, our technology opens more options. It may be possible to laze and then destroy power lines to certain sections, further hampering troops inside. With enough prep time, we may even be able to keep power to the majority of the city, and make repair easier.

Unless we can hit enough leadership positions hard enough with enough precision, though, we must push within. I cannot see a way around it, only ways to speed it up.

[Cpt_Frank]

There are only 2 actual options, carpet bombing and city fight.
Carpet bombing will turn the Iraqi population against the US and city fight will be costly for the coalition forces.

[Gandalf]

We could send in LA street gangs...

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

There are only 2 actual options, carpet bombing and city fight.
Carpet bombing will turn the Iraqi population against the US and city fight will be costly for the coalition forces.

I'm not sure which is worse. Choose the first option and it could be the final straw for uniting world opinion finaly and utterly against the U.S., choose the second option and thousand of our soldiers lose their lives. This war is fucked up. You see why I'm anti-war? It's not that I like Saddam, it's that I think it's a bad fucking idea.

[Tsyroc]

How about a method that focuses more on the 'liberation' aspect of the war and less of the 'mindless destruction and slaugher' aspect?

It's not destruction and slaughter...it's liberation at the molecluar level.

Can't get much freer than that.

[Col. Crackpot]

155 MM chemical shells filled with pepper spray......hey it's a thought, and it doesn't involve ray guns or nukes

[Tsyroc]

Didn't someone already mention that US forces were playing Celine Dion music? I say they airdrop her into the center of Baghdad for a concert. That'll drive everyone out.

[Cpt_Frank]

There are only 2 actual options, carpet bombing and city fight.
Carpet bombing will turn the Iraqi population against the US and city fight will be costly for the coalition forces.

I'm not sure which is worse. Choose the first option and it could be the final straw for uniting world opinion finaly and utterly against the U.S., choose the second option and thousand of our soldiers lose their lives. This war is fucked up. You see why I'm anti-war? It's not that I like Saddam, it's that I think it's a bad fucking idea.

I see your point.
Originally I thought this war wasn't that bad (although I'd wished they had given the Inspectors some more time) but now it's slowly starting to get 'dirty'.
Well if history has thought us one thing then it's that war isn't pretty.

155 MM chemical shells filled with pepper spray

Violates ban of chemical weapons on the battlefield.

[Grand Admiral Thrawn]

Let's combine nuking and carpet bombing. We get.... CARPET NUKING! Load a bunch of B-52s up with nukes and watch a country glow!




Sillness reaching peak now.

[XPViking]

Personally, I'd think a siege would be the better option, if worrying about world opinion and lessening civilian casualties is what the US is after.

XPViking

[Edi]

I wish a mod would just delete all the Post Count++ posts from this thread...

Not a whole lot of options, really. The Fedayeen and Special Republican Guard forces will fight to the bitter end, simply because they are dead anyway for all the atrocities they've committed during Saddam's reign. Carpet bombing or leveling the city with artillery fire are out of the question. Indiscriminate mass destruction of Baghdad would cost the US all of the few shreds of international credibility it has regarding this war and any and all actions it might want to take in the future. There would be no allies left, not in Europe nor elsewhere in the world.´

Therefore, if siege and starving out the defenders (and by default, also the civilians, who will be the first to suffer) is ruled out as an option, it's going to have to be urban warfare, with the attendant casualties. For what the results of protracted urban warfare, see footage of downtown Grozny, Chechnya.

The most likely strategy will be that after the city has been surrounded, the coalition forces will drive wedges into the city to take key strategic targets and either destroy or occupy and fortify them, while leaving the areas outside the path of advance alone. Artillery fire and air strikes from helicopters and bombers using precision munitions would be used to take out fortified enemy strongpoints, the problem here is that the targets must be pinpointed and even then you're likely to have civilian casualties. Once the main targets are either destroyed or in coalition hands, pockets of resistance can be mopped up if they have been isolated first.



However, while the above strategy is better than just a blanket advance through all of the city all at once, it has some serious difficulties attached:

#1: The advance wedges have long flanks that are left open to attack and their vulnerability increases as they penetrate deeper into the city. They would be easy to attack, since the advance cannot possibly have an airtight perimeter in an urban environment.

#2: If target areas are not simply destroyed, but occupied (might be necessary for a variety of reasons), you have isolated pockets of coalition troops in the middle of enemy territory. Supply problems ensue.

#3: Enemy has almost total freedom of movement in areas outside the direct path of advance, and can therefore shift and concentrate troops as they see fit. They can probably use a greater volume of fire on any unit than the possible return fire from that unit. They are also familiar with the terrain, while the coalition troops are not.

#4: The urban environment reduces coalition firepower and technological advantage. Ranges are so short as to be meaningless in terms of weapons used, and the terrain favors the defender. Furthermore, the personal weapons used by the Iraqi military (mainly AK-47 and carbon copies, afaik) are better suited to urban combat than the weapons of the coalition troops, so at the personal level, the actual firepower advantage shifts to the Iraqis.

#5: The coalition troops also need to at least make an effort to differentiate between civilian and military/militia targets, which is likely to increase casualties, and the Iraqi troops might use civilians as shields, which will eventually result in a large number of civilian dead and the attendant bad PR for the coalition, regardless of whether it is their fault or not that the civilians died.

#6: Air support for coalition troops (at least helo-support) is iffy, because the aircraft will be exposed to enemy AA fire, and it doesn't take a lot to bring them down. There are numerous examples in both Chechnya and the better known incident in Mogadishu to give an indication of just what this entails.

The only real advantage the coalition troops will have is superior training and unit cohesion, which does amount to a great deal, but is in this case mostly offset by the disadvnatages listed above.

Taking Baghdad is going to be anything but easy. Prepare for an extremely ugly and quite possibly very long battle, and for a large number of coalition dead.

**********************

This is my assessment of the difficulties involved. I've based it on a worse-case scenario where I assume things will go down the shitter so that if they don't, the outcome will be a pleasant surprise as opposed to an unpleasant one. I would appreciate it if the other military people on this board would correct any mistakes I might have made in the above, as well as analysis of what sort of tactics are likely to be used. I am not very familiar with the American equipment, so I could only go with what I am familiar with from my own training and the tactics we were taught and the equipment we had, as well as what I have learned about the Chechnyan conflict and the Mogadishu incident.

Edi

[The Duchess of Zeon]

http://www.urbanoperations.com/vietnam.htm

Read the articles here on Hue. Just study the action and apply what was done, taking into account what our forces have or do not have today in terms of technology, and the shift in the moral factor. Apply it against the differing terrain and size of the city of Baghdad, and the differing defenders and their moral factor.

Remember that the RGFC are in ring defences around the city, not in the city proper, so numerically the defenders will be the Special Republican Guard and irregular units - It's a classic soviet deployment.

Yes, there are going to be casualties in the Battle for Baghdad, but I sincerely doubt they'll exceed a thousand.

[Edi]

Remember that the RGFC are in ring defences around the city, not in the city proper, so numerically the defenders will be the Special Republican Guard and irregular units - It's a classic soviet deployment.

Yes, there are going to be casualties in the Battle for Baghdad, but I sincerely doubt they'll exceed a thousand.

They are, initially, but they will eventually fall back into more defensible positions when their first lines of defense start to give. They will not stay static, but will seek more advantageous locations, and ultimately those will be in the city proper (assuming none of the units surrender, and in worst-case scenarios that is a given).

As for the casualty figures of only 1000, the USMC lost at least ten dead in relatively minor skirmishes in either Nasiriya, Najaf or Karbala, I forget which. Baghdad will be much more heavily defended, with troops that have better morale and more motivation, and the territory that must be taken is an order of magnitude larger. 1000 coalition dead is a very optimistic figure. Do you have any idea of how many troops it takes to actually conquer even a single large city block? Never mind a whole city? The defender has a big advantage, and will use it to the full extent, never doubt. Overconfidence will just result in more coalition dead, something nobody here wants.

Edi

[The Duchess of Zeon]

They are, initially, but they will eventually fall back into more defensible positions when their first lines of defense start to give. They will not stay static, but will seek more advantageous locations, and ultimately those will be in the city proper (assuming none of the units surrender, and in worst-case scenarios that is a given).

If they try to retire in the face of our air power they're gone - Remember the Highway of Death? Their only hope is the weather, and if it reaches conditions that keeps our aircraft from flying sorties, they may not be able to find Baghdad; those sandstorms are quite vicious and they don't have the internal navigation systems we do. They're sunk one way or another.

Do you have any idea of how many troops it takes to actually conquer even a single large city block? Never mind a whole city? The defender has a big advantage, and will use it to the full extent, never doubt. Overconfidence will just result in more coalition dead, something nobody here wants.

Edi

I think you should read about the battle of Hue, our tactics during it, our opposition, and the casualties we suffered taking it, along with the lessons we learned from it, before you judge what sort of casualties we'd take in Baghdad.

[Edi]

If they try to retire in the face of our air power they're gone - Remember the Highway of Death? Their only hope is the weather, and if it reaches conditions that keeps our aircraft from flying sorties, they may not be able to find Baghdad; those sandstorms are quite vicious and they don't have the internal navigation systems we do. They're sunk one way or another.

I remember the Highway of Death, but the conditions around Baghdad are not quite the same, and they have learned their lesson from that too, you can bet. It also takes a lot more bad weather to prevent them from finding Baghdad than it takes to keep the aircraft on the ground. You are too focused on the technological differences and don't give enough attention to competence not reliant on technology, and as a result, you are overconfident and tend to dismiss the Iraqi military on the ground as harmless and ineffective, when in fact already in Basra, Umm Qasr, Karbala and Nasiriyah they have demonstrated a capability for stubborn and hard-to-dislodge resistance. You underestimate the enemy you face.

Do you have any idea of how many troops it takes to actually conquer even a single large city block? Never mind a whole city? The defender has a big advantage, and will use it to the full extent, never doubt. Overconfidence will just result in more coalition dead, something nobody here wants.

Edi

I think you should read about the battle of Hue, our tactics during it, our opposition, and the casualties we suffered taking it, along with the lessons we learned from it, before you judge what sort of casualties we'd take in Baghdad.

I took a good enough look at those articles, and the situation is not remotely the same. First off, you don't have friendly troops already in the city holding a fortified position and requiring the enemy to spend an effort on them, you have a number of enemies nearly an order of magnitude greater, dug in, fortified, and with better equipment than the VC at Hue, the terrain is different, you're still operating under the same constraints, and the territory you want to take is substantially larger.

Again, take a look at Mogadishu, and especially at Grozny, to see what it can be like, those are far more recent and relevant examples. Granted, the coalition troops are better trained, motivated and equipped than the Russian conscripts in Chechnya, so they will not make the same gross mistakes, but Grozny is the battle you should pay more attention to than the battle of Hue.

Rob Wilson, Knife, Coyote, jegs2, what's your take on this? How many holes did my assessment have in it, and how much are I and the Duchess off track here?

Edi

[Vympel]

I don't think Hue is a meaningful comparison personally. Two regiments rather than divisions defending the city. A city of 5,000,000 rather than 100,000.

The Marine counterattack jumped off on 4 February. Cheatham had his right flank on the river. Gavel was further south. The North Vietnamese had converted the large government buildings they held into strong points: snipers in the upper stories, machine guns in the ground floors, mortars from hidden positions, and a webwork of spider holes. Their best weapons were the AK-47 automatic rifle and the B-40 rocket launcher. The Marines had M-16 rifles which many thought not as good as the Soviet-designed AK-47. They liked their M-79 40mm grenade launchers, which they called a "blooper," and they had M-60 machine guns. They used grenades and CS tear gas to bring the North Vietnamese out of their holes. For battering their way through walls, the Marines had the 90mm guns of the M48A3 tanks or, even better; their 106mm recoilless rifles, some of them mounted on a thin-skinned little tracked vehicle called an "Ontos."

No more Ontos. No more 106mm RR. No more M79 'blooper' (the M203 isn't as accurate). On the other hand, the Iraqis have much more firepower- the RPG-7 equip their units like white on rice (a better piece of kit than the old RPG-2/B-40), and they also probably have lots of the Soviet RRs- the 82mm B-10, 107mm B-11, and 73mm SPG-9. They have anti-tank missiles which can be used for the job of direct fire shock- but it's wasteful and sub-optimal.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

I don't think Hue is a meaningful comparison personally. Two regiments rather than divisions defending the city. A city of 5,000,000 rather than 100,000.

Here are the forces and their equippage:

The enemy forces initially committed to Hue were equivalent to a division consisting of approximately 10 battalions. Commanded by the 6th Regiment, the following units were used initially:

6th Regiment-consisting of three infantry battalions
4th Regiment-consisting of three infantry battalions
SAPPER Battalions-consisting of two battalions
Mortar Battalions-consisting of two battalions


This force totaled 6,000 men. Before the flow of enemy reinforcement could be checked, the NVA/VC forces operating within Hue increased to 16 battalions. 8 These forces would also include elements of the NLF
(National Liberation Front).9 By virtue of their infiltration mission, mobility of the enemy force was restricted to foot. The drastic disparity in relative combat power was reflected by the absence of armor, gun/howitzer batteries, and aviation. However, the enemy possessed the proper mix of automatic, anti-tank and sniper rifles organized into strong-point positions to be an effective urban warfare force.

Also, the city was closer in population to 150,000 rather than 100,000, which does make some difference in considerations.

For other notes, I'd add that the combination of the civilian slaughter by the Vietnamese Communists and the mix of construction in Hue does provide some comparison with Baghdad - Along with the fact that Hue, like Baghdad, is split in two by a river.

Edi, the citadel was held by Vietnamese Communists, and only forced in the last of the fighting by the South Vietnamese commando company - the Hac Bao - which finished off the holdouts. It also provided a good defensive terrain to withstand the assault.

Note: the attacking force, combined U.S. and ARVN forces, only totalled 19 battalions at the maximal point of commitment.