Prior to the Gulf War in 1991 there was intense interest in gaming circles in using our simulations as devices to examine possible courses of the anticipated conflict. In an odd deja vu, a decade later the United States is on the brink of fighting virtually the same war. This time we garners have not done up the impending war as we did before. Perhaps it was the egg on the face left in 1991 when everyone's predictions for casualties turned out to be wild overestimates, given an Iraqi army mostly in a hurry to throw down its weapons. Perhaps it is the distractions that beset us at every turn. Or general attitudes may have changed as well. At least one game executive, Mike Benninghof of Avalanche, has stated a policy of deliberately refusing to do a game on a current war so as not to earn money off of national tragedy. In any case, where before the outbreak of hostilities in 1991 there were already three games on the topic of an Iraq-Kuwait war, in 2003 there is just one. What would an Iraq war game look like? What might we expect to be its salient features? That is today's subject.  I mentioned there is one existing game. This is by designers Ty Bomba and Joe Miranda and appeared in the summer of 2002. In actuality Back to Iraq in Strategy & Tactics magazine #208 got out early at least in part because it represents an update of one of the earlier Iraq wargames. Nevertheless Bomba and Miranda give us a point of departure for our discussion. They have some good insights, but the game naturally also suffers from having gone to print before the larger outlines of the conflict were shaped. Briefly, Back to Iraq is an operational/strategic game with 17-mile hexes and two day turns. Units are divisions except for certain special forces and other units. The existence of an IraqiAl Qaeda alliance is assumed, and the Iraqi player in the game is called the "Muslim Islamic Player," who gains points for various game actions, and victory is based upon his point score plus possession (or lack thereof) of Iraqi cities on the mapboard. The game provides for chemical and nuclear weapons but not biologicals. There are river crossing rules, to which we will presently return. Prospect of War At this writing, mid-February 2003, the prospective war against Iraq is rapidly taking shape. While the Bush administration talks about weapons of mass destruction, they are taking no significant military action with respect to a larger weapons problem that has developed in North Korea. This indicates the objective of regime change is the key one for administration strategists. Indeed President Bush has spoken of prosecuting Saddam Hussein and his top subordinates for war crimes. Our prospective game thus needs to feature an Iraqi government and make it possible for the players to attack/defend that government. The Bomba-Miranda game does have objectives (termed "targets" and primed for air attack or special forces uncovery), but none of these is Saddam. The possible ones are dummies, air defenses, command control (C41), information warfare facilities, infrastructure, surface-tosurface missiles, terrorist bases, weapons of mass destruction, hostages, and uprisings (in a nice feature the targets are deployed hidden and certain of them count negatively against the U.S. player if these are eliminated). This general approach serves some of the purposes of a U.S. war, even the war we contemplate today, but not its main goal, the capture of Saddam. Our Iraqi game should therefore have a more detailed representation of the Iraqi government structure from Saddam down, separate and distinct from military command control, and provided with some limited capacity for faking to reflect Saddam's use of body doubles, concealment, and other deceptive measures. A corollary to the Saddam issue is representation of Iraqi terrain. Our game should represent Iraqi presidential palaces and major government sites where Saddam could be located. These would be primarily in the areas of Baghdad and Tikrit. This suggests a strategic map of some sort combined with a city map of Baghdad. That level of representation would also concord with what is being viewed as the preferred Iraqi defense strategy, which will be to defend the city using Saddam's elite Republican Guard and Special Guard troops, with the regular army mounting a more distant defense on the approaches. That would also indicate a brigade/battalion style of unit representation. With its 17 mile hexes the Bomba Miranda game has a two-hex Baghdad and division, sometimes even corps-size units. These are rather too cumbersome for the style of war now expected. Objectives and Game Presentation United States objectives are also related directly to game presentation. In this case the "Noriega Option" of apprehending Saddam can only be achieved by a lightning descent upon Baghdad and the associated leadership hideaways. A lengthy preliminary air campaign is ruled out for that would simply provide warning. Instead an intense neutralization of Iraqi air defenses is to be expected simultaneous with an assault landing at Baghdad airfields, probably by troops of the 82" Airborne Division from out of theater making a long-range operation. Rather than strategic attack or softening up Iraqi defenses, air activity will probably focus= on close air support and interdiction of movements toward the front. This reversal of the tactics of the 1991 Gulf War will be necessary to preserve Iraqi infrastructure, which will be necessary in postwar occupation and recreation of the Iraqi economy. For game purposes, the air system should feature some variant on capabilities moderated by defenses. That is, the U.S./Allied player would have given air capabilities that are reduced depending on the residual status of Iraqi defenses. The player would have missions he can allocate to, but strategic air attack should cost the U.S. player as well, perhaps in lost victory points. Seized airfields around Baghdad would be used as forward operating bases for heliborne insertion of airborne, special forces, and air cavalry elements making the strikes on palaces and other potential hideaways. This style of operations is the only possibility for avoiding the heavy city fighting that would give advantage to the Iraqi defenders, but it also offers the danger of being trapped into Mogadishu-type firefights that put at risk U.S. elite forces. The major Iraqi options will be counterattacking the air bases and staging such "Black Hawk Down" scenarios. Iraqi Republican Guard forces are presently reported to be deployed in a series of rings spreading out from Baghdad, which will facilitate that tactical approach. The net situation at D+1 will be something very much like the battle of Arnhem in 1944--U.S. troops forward deployed and surrounded by the enemy at a distance of about 275 miles from the Kuwaiti border. Unlike Arnhem there will be two possible approaches -- through Basrah and Al Kut (where a hapless British army expired on its own Baghdad expedition in World War I), which has the best road connection but is somewhat longer and will bring the relief forces up on the side of the city opposite to the U.S.-held airbases; or through Nasiriya and then either east or west of the Euphrates. The alternative of an approach through Turkey and coming south across Kurdish-held land is minor and secondary (neither the Turkish alliance nor the logistics will sustain more than a small force, perhaps two brigades, at the end of this approach, and that force would have to overcome some eight regular and two Republican Guard divisions holding such built-up positions as Mosul, Samarra, and Tikrit before it could even reach Baghdad, where it would simply be another small U.S. force like the airborne troops who need to be relieved). From Kuwait the attack formation will be able to count on five or six divisions and a couple of armored cavalry groups, including Marines, the 101s' Air Assault, the 3rd Mechanized, and the British 1st Armored Division. A more detailed survey of the offensive problem in southern Iraq indicates more of the aspects our game will need to take into account. The Bomba-Miranda game shows all this as clear terrain (except the El Faw peninsula), but in fact the Rumailia and Zubayr oilfields are major installations here, and there are numerous storage tank facilities and refineries along the banks of the Tigris up to and past Basrah. Saddam's scorched earth strategy would be to blow these up to create an environmental catastrophe and interfere with U.S. technical systems in the tactical situation. The U.S. goal will be to avoid that eventuality, again dictating lightning operations by small units. Special Forces, some U.S. Marines, the 101st Air Assault Division, and the Royal Marines, which are among the longest-legged of coalition forces, will have to be preoccupied initially with securing these objectives. This means that the first phase of operations will put coalition regular forces with minimum flexibility on a long road to Baghdad. The Euphrates river, in particular, is surrounded by marshes and susceptible to being flooded if the Iraqis decide to open up up-river dams. The whole question of quasi-amphibious operations and bridging equipment is thereby opened up. The coalition will possess some advantages with U.S. and Royal Marines but the situation is not clear cut. The Nasiriyah route to Baghdad is the most tactically desirable but it is also the one most susceptible to these physical obstacles. In the Bomba-Miranda game Back to Baghdad river crossing is automatic though the movement point cost is variable up to the outcome of a die roll. Given the possibilities inherent in todays situation, however, I think river crossing should be automatic for only U.S. Marines, and that bridging equipment for other units should be explicitly represented. In this environment even a few Iraqis with AK-47s are going to be able to slow down the U.S. advance. And as at Arnhem, time will be of the essence. American commanders count upon their high technology to paralyze and disconcert the Iraqi adversary. Certain novel "nonlethal" weapons, such as electromagnetic pulse weapons, are supposed to be able to cancel out Iraqi command control. Others, new gases, are to incapacitate the enemy on the ground. But the hi-tech forces may not be immune to our own weapons. Conversely, Saddam supposedly has the stock of weapons of mass destruction that it is the asserted purpose of this war to rid him of. U.S. intelligence estimates have held for years, most recently last October, that Saddam would use those weapons if his regime were threatened. Rules for these instrumentalities on both sides will be critical to our game system. Pick any suitable CBW rules (the ones on the Bomba-Miranda game are reasonable except for their "Massive Response" codicile which permits the U.S. player to simply pick up stacks of enemy units and take them off the board). As for the incapacitation effect, a pre-combat die roll similar to a morale check could be used for that. Morale In general Morale needs to be treated explicitly (in Back to Baghdad it is not). All the wargames done before the Gulf War were used to make predictions as to potential U.S. casualties and all those predictions proved wildly inaccurate. Why? Because the Iraqis did not fight in 1991. Some observers seem to assume that will be the case today. There are no predictions from wargames, but a New York Times/CBS News poll taken in mid-February 2002 shows that almost 40% of Americans expect fewer than 1,000 U.S. soldiers will die in a war while losses of 1,000-5,000 are anticipated by almost 30% of respondents. Only a little more than a fifth of the sample expect battle deaths of more than 5,000. If this war turns into a "Bridge Too Far" situation the lower predictions will almost certainly prove wrong. The typical formulation is that the Iraqi regular army will melt away and the Republican Guard may fight. This should certainly be reflected in our game with a Morale check separate from the incapacitation check (or the two processes could moderate each other). It should be noted that there are reasons to suppose the assumptions regarding Iraqi morale and willingness to be rid of Saddam, and conversely of Iraqi minorities to line up on our side, may be incorrect. In 1991 Iraq had come come off a decade-long war with Iran and was tired. Today Iraqis have borne the brunt of a decade of U.N. sanctions certainly perceived to have been American-imposed. As for the minorities, the U.S., after making supportive moves, has ruled out the Iraqi resistance as the post-Saddam government, and agreed with Turkey that that country can occupy Kurdish territory, each of which angers one of the relevant minorities. The third, the Marsh Arabs, were decimated after the U.S. in 1991 encouraged them to rise up against Saddam and then did nothing to aid the rebellion. The Marsh Arabs are likely to sit out this war. These factors suggest that the U.S. war plan will have to succeed or fail based on its own merits and not some eleventh-hour rising that topples Saddam. In summary a current simulation of the possible war with Iraq can be crafted and should feature the elements suggested here. In my view such a wargame will show that the planned U.S. offensive is significantly more difficult and dangerous than has been portrayed by authorities. Perhaps this is why we continue to hear reports that military officers are much more leery of this war than Bush administration officials. Back to Table of Contents -- Against the Odds vol. 1 no. 4 Back to Against the Odds List of Issues Back to MagWeb Magazine List © Copyright 2003 by LPS. This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com * Buy this back issue or subscribe to Against the Odds direct from LPS.