1991 Persian Gulf War

On the Brink of a New World Order
Part 2

by David Nilsen and Greg Novak

Note: Due to the length of this supplement, we could not fit all of it into a single issue, nor even two issues, without displacing too much material on other topics. This is the second installment of the supplement that was begun in Command Post Quarterly #4. Part 1 contained the Coalition Order of Battle and Organizational Tables and a map of the Theater of Operations, while Part 2 contains the Iraqi Order of Battle and Organizational Tables and a map of the area of ground operations. The extensive equipment and vehicle ratings, re-rated and presented in the Command Decision 2 format, will all be presented in one consolidated mass in CPQ #6.

Naturally, this Gulf War material will not appeal to everyone, whether because of a lack of interest in post-World War II topics, or because of the jaded gainer's protestation that the war was dull and insufficiently play-balanced (reality is so inconvenient sometimes). This material is still of use to this latter group as it provides much longawaited modem OB and equipment data for use in assembling your own scenarios.

For those who are still interested in the Gulf War (and we are a proud brotherhood, aren't we?), the map included with this installment will assist Command Decision/Combined Arms (CD/CA) players in using these OBs to generate historical and semi-historical scenarios. Those of you who have studied other Desert Storm maps for placement of forces, unit boundaries, national boundaries, etc., will notice that the map included here differs in slight details from others. Not to worry. No other two maps in any official or unofficial account agree on even such "simple" things as national boundaries, let alone the placement of units, unit boundaries, swamps, and lakes, so my map will be slightly different from all of the others as I resolve various inconsistencies to my satisfaction. Fair is fair.

And now a few words about the Iraqi OB:

NOTHING IS CERTAIN.

And for that you have my apologies, because it is our job here at GDW to research these things so you can have a reasonable sense of security that the data you are using is correct. However, the fact is that state-of-the-art Iraqi OB research is pretty chaotic.

There will probably never be any firm information on the configuration of the Iraqi Army on either 24 or 28 February 1991. This has something to do with the closed nature of Iraqi society and the fact that they lost, but also has much to do with the slapdash nature of the Iraqi Army. In an army which operates weapons obtained from France, the Soviet Union, Romania, Brazil, Hungary, China, etc., and pressed into service other randomly captured British and American equipment, there was precious little uniformity of equipage or organization. Add to this the tendency to split the army into various little levels of elitism, each of which could receive preferential access to equipment, and you have a witches' brew of uncertainty for the plucky OB researcher.

There is also an interesting phenomenon that asserts itself when researching any Arab OB. Those readers who kept track of the Coalition build-up in Saudi Arabia during Desert Shield no doubt noticed the many brigades that were arriving in the theater from the Islamic world. Those of you who have done post-war follow-ups on this material may perhaps have been surprised to see how many of these "brigades" turned out to be battalions or reinforced companies. Part of this confusion was certainly due to heat-of-the-moment reporting by a professional press that takes inordinate pride in its ignorance of icky topics like warfare. However, part of the problem lies in the Arabic language itself.

The Arabic language has not yet "stabilized," i.e., although the same words are used by all Arab societies, the precise meanings of many words are only formalized within individual tribes or nations. This is particularly a problem with military terminology, as Arabic does not have a large number of words to describe various sizes and types of military units, and the words that it does have do not have uniform meanings. Unlike in the West, most Arab nations have not had experience with large-scale warfare, and have never even attempted division level operations, and have very little call for words like "corps." For example, Wihda and Liwa both mean "unit," but neither word inherently refers to a specific size of unit. Both words are used by individual Arab nations with specific localized meanings, such as battalion or brigade, but these meanings vary from nation to nation, making the identification of Arab units rather tricky. In addition, Liwa is also used to mean Major General, and is the word used by Iraq for province (of which they have 18 or 19, depending upon your point of view). When you think that even when sharing a "stabilized" language, the Americans and British cannot agree on the meaning of regiment, squadron, or troop, the variations in translating the Arabic further adds to the confusion.

There are also assessment difficulties that arise from the way different armies view themselves. In the US Army, divisions are permanent units while brigades function (theoretically) as formations to organize the elements belonging to each division. In the Iraqi Army, the reverse seems to be the case, where brigades are the basic building blocks (they are numbered in a single series which includes all types of brigades-the Iraqi Army has only one 5th Brigade, not a 5th Infantry, a 5th Tank, a 5th Artillery etc.), and divisions are formations which are created to control several brigades. It is significant that for many Iraqi divisions the division takes its numerical designation from one of its constituent brigades, usually the lowest-numbered one.

So when we Americans see a quantity of Iraqi line brigades, we take the number, divide by three, and say, "Aha! Divisions!" On the other hand, when the Iraqi leadership see a number of their own brigades, they say, "Aha! Brigades!" after first getting several of their number shot before checking to see if Saddam came up with the same number. This means that American analysis is hell-bent on deciding what stuff belongs to each Iraqi division, and coming up with a different answer every time. In reality, the Iraqis have divided their army into a million little penny, nickel, and dime parcels which they combine and recombine in ways which are endlessly infuriating to American analysts.

A final example is whether to credit Iraqi tank units with three or four tanks per platoon. You will note that the organizations below go with the three-tank platoon, although this is a departure from material published previously by GDW. This is typical of another problem with Iraqi OBs, because you would expect agreement on such a basic issue. But you would be wrong.

Read any of the US Army sources that appeared in the period leading up to the war (Military Review, Army, Armor, and Infantry, using material from the Fort Leavenworth Combined Arms Committee, and all of the little AIA handbooks), and you will find the consistent refrain of four tanks per platoon, yielding 44 tanks per regular army battalion and 58 (almost always phrased: "55-60") per Republican Guard battalion.

Then look at in-theater intelligence assessments, where you will find consistent counts of 35 tanks per army battalion or 44 per RG battalion (also rendered as 107 per army brigade-3x35+2-and 134 per RG brigade-3x44+2), which works out to three-tank platoons.

I have chosen to go with the three-tank number for a variety of reasons (Soviet-style organizations for Soviet equipment, for example), but one of the most compelling is that the three-tank model is hallowed by its use as the basis for the tote board in the epic CENTCOM "How Many Tanks Did We Kill Today?" Telethon.

(It is interesting to speculate that part of the great disagreements between the CIA and CENTCOM assessments of the air war battlefield preparation had to do with differences between stateside and in-theater models of Iraqi organization, but that's neither here nor there.)

NOTHING IS CERTAIN. But don't blame me, I'm not in charge.

Jumbo Map (very slow: 192K)



1991 Persian Gulf War Supplement Part 2

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© Copyright 1994 by Greg Novak.
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