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Originally Posted by Slava
Admittedly this was from an article that I read years ago that was clearly slanted as it was making the case that this was a propaganda effort by both sides as much as anything. The thing is though that while this as a crushing defeat, its still hard to be impressed because of the sheer amount of firepower and manpower here.
Like I say, we've all seen this playing board games where one guy builds up an enormous army and sits on the door step of the other who tries in vain to match this. Eventually, the outcome is hardly strategic mastery or unforeseen brilliant strategy. Its a beat down. If your figures are right, that only proves this point...a few hundred deaths compared to tens of thousands. Its all firepower and technology.
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I completely disagree with you.
This was more then a fire power on firepower battle, the figures point to that.
The strategy was brilliant and something that the Iraqi's who had plenty of time to prepare for didn't see happening. You also have to remember that the Iraqi military was fairly battle hardened after 8 years of a slugfest in the swamps against Iran.
On top of that Swarzkopf was able to bring together a very diverse coalition in a very short period of time.
The battleplan was more then perfect, the numbers point to that, the fact that Swarzkopf managed to integrate Soviet firebag strategies with American mobility and created a offensive game plan that took advantage of technology points to the fact that he had a brilliant game plan.
This wasn't command and conquer. The coalition didn't have some superior military in terms of man power or unit strength. They had faster tanks and took advantage of it with a high speed unpredictable mobility war. They had better gun sights then the Iraqi's for the most part and took advantage of that with their war plan.
No matter which way you slice it when you have a roughly 166/1 casualty ratio a large part of that is your game plan and understanding how the enemy things.