Make the Iraqi military inflict more casualties on the Coalition during the Persian Gulf War...

Make the Iraqi military inflict more casualties on the Coalition during the Persian Gulf War. How would the Iraqi's accomplish inflicting thousands of more casualties on the Coalition forces in an alternate scenario of the Gulf War in 1991?

Stop pretending that you have an actual soviet-style combined arms army that can compete with overwhelming Coalition strength in all aspects. Hunker down into the big cities and go for guerrilla warfare immediately.

Instead of sending your armored forces into the desert to get shot up by tanks you can't destroy or by aircraft you can't see, make every street corner an ambush spot with your armored units acting in extreme close quarters combined with infantry support. You'll lose anyway but you can probably draw the conflict out by a few months, massively increase casualties on the Coalition side and gain international sympathy from all the inevitable civilian deaths.

Sponsor a coup in Saudi Arabia and laugh as the country falls apart into a multi-sided civil war that bogs down the Coalition.

How would the Republican Guard perform against coalition infantry in an urban situation like this? Are they even close to their combat ability, being the "elite" of the Iraqi military?

Either:

Go on the offensive and push deep into Saudi Arabia before American troops can arrive in force, thus denying them the air and naval bases that were used in the buildup. Take control of Saudi oil fields and threaten to destroy them if US-led coalition forces try to retake the territory. This will lead to the United States launching a more cautious military response.

Don't even bother with fortifying the Kuwaiti-Saudi frontier. It's flat land with no terrain to anchor a defense on. Pull the regular Iraqi Army back to Iraq proper (they'll be more inclined to fight to defend their own country than Kuwait) consolidate Republican Guard forces in the Kuwaiti capital, which will force the United States to either be far more judicious in its application of air power or risk enraging the Arab world by laying waste to one of the crown jewels of the Middle East. Either way, it will be a far bloodier and protracted engagement.

OR

Don't launch a full scale invasion of Kuwait at all. Shelling a few of their border outposts and oil fields will be enough to showcase your military might dissuade them from slant drilling. All while not being political disruptive enough to attract the ire of the United States.

Probably pretty good, desu. They are at least comparable in motivation, morale and esprit de corps, if not in equipment and training. The Republican guard units were one of the few Iraqi army units that offered any sort of serious resistance to Coalition forces, as seen in the battles of Medina Ridge, 73 Eastings and Norfolk. Especially the Tawakalna Division's infantry elements showed a lot of courage by being one of the few Iraqi units at Eastings by mounting counter attacks at night. They were beaten back, but still managed an orderly retreat back into Iraq. Pretty ballsy considering the technological disparity.

Don’t set up static defenses in the desert when your enemy has GPS and has nominal control of the skies. Do not engage in conventional warfare with an enemy that is exceedingly better equipped/trained to do so. Saddam and his generals did have the correct idea in that causing high coalition casualties would cause a backlash at home, but didn’t even try and use the tactics that the PAVN utilized a few decades back.

So practically like ISIS has done in Iraq?

Military exercises suggest that the best approach would have been to, "preempt the preempters." Which would mean blowing your entire load of any and all ballistic missiles in an effort to sink the Coalition naval fleet and then at the same time sending out large quantities of suicide boats. Of course you're going to have to keep a minimum electronic footprint too, so consider writing orders out on paper and using motorcycles to get those orders around. Finally, don't expect to win, but be ready to fight on even after an official defeat.

Use a giant catapult to fire cannisters of nerve gas into New York.

Or build a super duper big artillery gun.

Use your weapons of mass destruction

The answer always is exterminate the kurds

In the 1991 Gulf War? Umm... Try?

Most of the veteran forces the Coalition came across surrendered on sight - they reported that they were in fact ordered to do so. Most of the folks who did put up a fight were irregulars and civilians. Saddam, or at least some of his military advisors, realized that the whole war was basically the result of a misunderstanding, and after throwing a bit of a temper tantrum exiting Kuwait, they figured Iraq's best bet to retain its sovereignty and save enough face in order to avoid seeming so weak that it fell into civil war while also retaining enough military power to prevent its rivals from moving in, was a piecemeal surrender.

The sanctions, however, kinda fubared that plan. By the time the next war came around, most of the military hadn't been paid for years, and they had sold most of their hardware off. Part of what made 2003 such a joke was that Saddam wasn't really in control anymore. Outside of the capital and maybe two other cities, he had no power to effect anything, and was pretty much restricted to keeping himself alive, relying on sheer fearful reputation to hold the rest of the nation together.

Folks tend to forget that in the first Gulf War, Iraq had the fourth largest army in the world, and the largest number of post-green troops anywhere. While it's true they couldn't have won, if they had wanted to, they coulda made it real ugly. That was why the response was so tremendous to begin with, as that was exactly what we feared. Luckily, they wanted to live to fight another day, rather than go out in a blaze of glory.

>Folks tend to forget that in the first Gulf War, Iraq had the fourth largest army in the world, and the largest number of post-green troops anywhere.

Iraq's army was bled white by the war with Iran. A lot of them at long since lost confidence in their leaders and in themselves.

If we had been facing the confident and enthusiastic Iraqi Army that had marched into Iran in 1981, even with the technological disparity, it would've been a different story.

considering that that enthusiastic and confident army which marched into Iran got stopped in its track by the stumbling mess of the purged and off-balance Iranian army, I doubt it would've changed much

They actually made a lot of progress into Iran at first, it was Saddam's fumbling that caused them to lose momentum. At which point, it degenerated into WW1 2.0 Proper Sequel Boogaloo, a conflict Iran was destined to eventually win because of its larger population.

quantity =/= quality

The Soviet Union found this out the hard way in 1941.

Not saying they could have won, but when you send (read give) nearly your entire air force to an enemy state, and order the best of your military to surrender immediately on engagement, you do a whole lot less damage than you could have.

They never intended to fight - the brass had decided to preserve its military insomuch as it could for future use. By the time the second war came around, the brass didn't have control, and few of the actual army wanted to fight, and having sold most of their hardware in the interim, were in no condition to do so.

The German Army outnumbered the Russians in 1941

I love the Iran-Iraq War
its surreal to see waves of human childrens advancing through the front line to detonate mines followed by regulars in relentless attacks with gas weapons
I'd say Iran did pretty good considering they had an embargo on them the whole time and was basically in the same position Stalin did at Barbarossa

Saddam fucked up by playing slow in Kuwait. He should've blitzed straight into Saudi Arabia and used his SCUD assets on Israel or other strategic targets much quicker. Or this Launch an attack on the coalition as they were deploying instead of let them concentrate and than sending a division on a suicide mission into Khafji (another retarded move because it isolated him even more in the eyes of the Arab world)

Why didn't he attack Saudi Arabia?

Wasn't his plan. He had permission to attack Kuwait (or at least assurances that the US wouldn't interfere when he asked). If he didn't do it himself, his people would have (and there'd already been skirmishes), which would have been a threat to his own power in turn, so not much choice in the end anyways. Attacking a heavily invested ally like Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, would guarantee an instant and extreme response from the US. Plus, unlike Kuwait, that woulda been a real conflict - Saudi Arabia had a real army and tons of allies, even ignoring the inevitable US conflict, and provided a lot less actual justification.

> He had permission to attack Kuwait (or at least assurances that the US wouldn't interfere when he asked).

He was an idiot for falling for it. You'd think for a man who already had a relationship with Donald Rumsfeld and George H. W. Bush, Saddam would've known not to fall into what was an obvious trap they had been setting.

I'm... Not so sure it was a trap, so much as the left hand not knowing what the right was doing, or the PtB's setting that policy before discussing it with all their allies. Unlike some articles suggest, it was official state department policy, not some misinformation given by a single female diplomat - she merely delivered that message. If a trap was the intent, I think we woulda gone for regime change the first time (which, might have been kinder - those sanctions were nasty).

>nominal control
i dont think you know what that means

Plus it was a Catch-22, his own political allies were talking about running an invasion with irregulars, with or without the central government's support, which would have no doubt lead to a civil war. This is among the reasons he cited when he went asking the US if they'd interfere.

The Coalition didn't want Iraq's cities. They wanted them to bugger off from Kuwait.

>How would the Iraqi's accomplish inflicting thousands of more casualties on the Coalition forces in an alternate scenario of the Gulf War in 1991?

endless guerrilla warfare basically, which is pointless for a regime like Hussein's that needs a functioning conventional state apparatus to oppress the people with, or large scale chemical weapons (that your enemy has protections for already) attacks.

Nuke Israel, fulfill the dream of all Arab states, die martyr when USA nukes Iraq back.