I keep getting asked by civilian friends whether our experience in Iraqi Freedom is likely to affect professional military opinion concerning the continued usefulness of the Army's heavy armored forces, which many believed until recently were destined for oblivion. It's a very good question, not least because the opinion at issue was by no means unanimous even before we invaded Iraq.
At first blush, Iraqi Freedom seems to have confirmed both the advantages and disadvantages of heavy ground forces. Among the advantages, few of the Army's tanks and armored fighting vehicles were lost to enemy action, and in most cases, their crews survived. Meanwhile, their fire-power and mobility devastated those Iraqi units that managed to escape destruction from the air and continued to fight.
That robustness also allowed coalition ground forces to take some risks that might have been much less acceptable without them. The best example was 3rd Infantry Division's precipitate entry into Baghdad, reflecting its commander's confidence that his Abrams and Bradleys could more than cope with whatever surviving Iraqi forces chose to resist. Blazing through Baghdad's relatively open downtown areas, U.S. heavy units briskly scotched prewar assertions about armor's inevitable vulnerability in an urban setting.
Finally, Iraqi Freedom merely reconfirmed the advantage of heavy over light forces in achieving and sustaining offensive momentum.
When Turkey refused to permit commitment of a heavy division through its territory, light infantry were airlifted into northern Iraq in its place. While tough and skillful, however, they simply lacked the protected mobility to match the tempo of their heavier counterparts in the south.
On the other hand, the familiar disadvantages of heavy forces also were apparent. As in Gulf War I, deploying them to the theater in the first place took considerable time, and once positioned, they couldn't easily be repositioned. In the event, shifting the 4th Infantry Division by sea from Turkey to Kuwait effectively deprived the coalition of the Army's most powerful ground formation for the duration.
Heavy forces also remain greedy consumers of expendable supplies, especially fuel. The 3rd ID's dash to Baghdad displayed impressive offensive elan, but it also required an extraordinary logistical effort, and one that a more proficient enemy might well have disrupted. As it was, unexpected fedayeen attacks on the division's lengthening supply line produced one of the war's few bad moments, slowing the advance and requiring the hasty commitment of additional rear-ward security forces to keep the supplies flowing.
Moreover, heavy forces are, well, heavy. Bridges, causeways and other manmade trafficways are not always capable of supporting them, and even those that are can erode quickly under repeated use. In Iraqi Freedom, nearly as many armored vehicles seem to have been lost in accidents as to enemy action.
Neither advantages nor disadvantages come as any surprise, particularly since both reflect the same physical attributes. The question is whether it might be possible in the future to retain the fighting qualities of heavy armor without incurring its deployment and logistical penalties. Concerning this issue, however, basing judgments on Iraqi Freedom is more dangerous.
Air-transportable fighting vehicles such as the Army's new Stryker certainly would have been helpful to the light infantry airlifted into the north in place of 4th ID and to their counterparts committed to mopping up Iraqi forces bypassed during the drive on Baghdad. Stryker-equipped units also might be ideally suited to current security and peace enforcement operations.
Whether they could safely have replaced heavy armor at the tip of the offensive spear is much less clear, however. Even against an enemy battered for days by uncontested airpower, anecdotal evidence suggests that light armor might have fared poorly. Friendly casualties almost certainly would have increased, and coalition forces probably couldn't have sustained the offensive momentum that appears to have played so important a role in breaking Baghdad's defenders psychologically as well as physically.
Both problems, moreover, must be evaluated in light of the enormous gap in combat capabilities and proficiency between coalition forces and their hapless adversaries. An anecdote from the first Gulf War is instructive. Inspecting an undamaged but abandoned Iraqi bunker complex on the approaches to Kuwait City, one Marine Corps officer reportedly commented, "Thank God they weren't North Vietnamese."
That, finally, is the principal reason Iraqi Freedom is an uncertain guide to future heavy force requirements. However we might wish it, we simply can't count on all our future enemies to be as accommodating as Saddam's reluctant warriors.
Heavy forces' days may well be numbered. In war, few capabilities are forever, but until technology can reproduce armor's unmatched firepower, mobility and protection in some lighter but equally reliable form, neither can we afford cavalierly to dispense with it.
[Author Affiliation]
RICHARD HART SINNREICH writes regularly for The (Lawton, Okla.) Sunday Constitution. This article originally appeared in the May 25, 2003 Sunday Constitution and is reprinted by permission of the author.
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