Strategy: Saddam's Deadly Trap

By Bruce W. Nelan

Saddam Hussein sees himself as the spider waiting for the fly. Sooner or later, he believes, U.S.-led ground troops will push into Kuwait to drive out the Iraqi army. There they will be massacred by the thousands as they encounter one of the most formidable defenses ever built. It will not be a victory militarily, but the mere fact of having prolonged the war and inflicted high casualties will make Saddam the winner psychologically.

That, at least, is the theory. And to that end Saddam and his military commanders have applied the experience they gained in their eight years of defensive battles against massed Iranian troops. Their highly skilled combat engineers have turned the Kuwaiti and Iraqi borders with Saudi Arabia into a Maginot Line in the sand. In an area about the size of West Virginia the Iraqis have poured 540,000 of their million-man army and 4,000 of their 6,000 tanks, along with thousands of other armored vehicles and artillery pieces.

These forces are deeply dug in behind layers of defensive barriers 40 miles wide. Bulldozers have piled sand walls up to 40 ft. high. Behind them is a network of ditches, some rigged with pipes to deliver oil that will be set on fire, and concrete tank traps. Behind those are miles of razor wire and at least 500,000 mines.

Iraqi units are entrenched in their now traditional triangular forts, formed of packed sand, with an infantry company equipped with heavy machine guns holding each corner. Soldiers are protected by portable concrete shelters or dugouts of sheet metal and sand. Tanks are hull deep in the ground and bolstered with sandbags. Artillery pieces are deployed at the apex of each ! triangle, pre-aimed at "killing zones" created by flaming trenches and minefields. Defensive deployments like these are immobile; the officers learned in their war with Iran to hunker down, absorb attacks and fire back with artillery, often loaded with chemical shells.

Backing these static deployments are nearby infantry reserves and armored units as well as artillery. Two divisions line the gulf coast north and south of Kuwait City to ward off amphibious landings by U.S. Marines. Farther back, along the Kuwait-Iraq border, are Saddam's best troops: the armored and mechanized divisions of Iraq's Republican Guards, which are now being relentlessly bombed by U.S. B-52s and other allied aircraft.

How formidable are these Iraqi troops? One Pentagon analyst concedes that until the Iraq-Iran war erupted in 1980, "we knew zero about the Iraqis." In that conflict Saddam's troops often bogged down in offensive operations but excelled in defense, particularly when resisting Iranian thrusts into their homeland. Though individual units sometimes broke under fire, the main ground forces proved to be courageous, tenacious -- and maliciously inventive. One bizarre operation rigged lowland marshes with electrodes to kill Iranians as they waded through the water toward Iraqi lines.

The ruling Baath Party had purged almost all non-Baathist officers from the army during the 1970s. As a result, the officer corps stopped seeing itself as the defender of a national entity known as Iraq and began to see its mission as the preservation of the party and its leader, Saddam Hussein. By 1980, a fifth of Iraq's work force was in the army, police or militia. The effect of Saddam's policies was to turn the country into an ideologically motivated military machine. Rumors of coups and plots within the military had no significant result on the conduct of the eight-year conflict with Iran, says Anthony Cordesman, author of The Lessons of Modern War, an authoritative study of the Iraq-Iran war.

Western experts consider the Iraqi army to be three forces in one:

-- The regular army, which consists of 50 infantry divisions of 12,000 men each, backed by substantial numbers of tanks and other armored vehicles.

-- The People's Army, a relatively weak, poorly trained and badly organized militia.

-- The vaunted Republican Guards, a tough combat force of 125,000 selected for their bravery and loyalty.

Saddam's strategy is clear -- making a virtue of necessity. He cannot reach out and strike the allied forces because his air force is in hiding or in exile, his insignificant navy is bottled up, and his Scud missiles are too inaccurate to pose much threat to military targets. He can only hope that the allied troops will come to him in a frontal assault on his fixed positions.

If that occurs, his troops would almost certainly let fly with shells loaded with chemical weapons -- mustard gas that sears and blisters, nerve agents that cause death in minutes, or even biological killers like anthrax and botulism. Experts still argue whether Iraq has biological warheads for its bombs or shells, but thousands of chemical weapons have been stored along the front in Iraq and Kuwait.

Chemical weapons are horrifying and unreliable, and some military specialists have questioned whether Saddam would resort to them. Poisons might not be highly effective because modern armored vehicles have filters to keep them out and infantrymen wear protective gear. But Saddam is determined to kill as many allied troops as possible, and his chemical shells caused an estimated 25,000 Iranian deaths.

Saddam's keen desire to lure allied forces into ground combat, the sooner the better, is obvious to General Norman Schwarzkopf and his colleagues. As the allied commander pointed out last week, his air campaign is now blasting the supply lines to Kuwait, especially bridges over the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

It would suit Schwarzkopf fine if cutting supply lines from the air would drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait, but that is not likely to happen. Since they use up a lot of supplies during combat -- Iraqi gunners fire as many shells in one day as Americans do in a week -- the Iraqis have stockpiled immense quantities of munitions.

Some U.S. commanders say there will be no attack on the ground until the fighting power of the Republican Guards has been reduced 30% to 50%. So far, allied air attacks have made only limited progress toward that goal. A senior U.S. official says the Iraqis are well dug in and so far seem to be riding out the bombing. "These are first-rate troops," he says. "We're seeing that they know how to disperse and protect themselves." Adds Michael Dewar, deputy director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London: "There is a massive amount of Iraqi firepower. Heavy bombing and artillery fire will destroy some of it but not all. There will be tough fighting."

The central question is not how much punishment the allies can inflict but how much the Iraqis are ready to absorb. Saddam claims that Iraq can accept large numbers of casualties but the U.S. cannot because public opinion will quickly turn against the war. His Foreign Minister, Tariq Aziz, told U.S. Secretary of State James Baker that Iraq could hold out for a year or even two. Both Iraqis have probably miscalculated again.

In due course, Saddam will get his wish. An allied ground assault will be needed, if only to mop up the remaining Iraqi force in Kuwait. But when the U.S.-led onslaught begins, it will not be an assault of the Iranian variety. To begin with, it will come in more than one place: a broad flanking movement far to the west, for example, possibly accompanied by a Marine amphibious landing in Kuwait and multiple feints at the fortified front as well. Because the Iraqis have no reconnaissance planes in the air and no battlefield intelligence aside from what they can see over their sand walls, they will not know which thrust is the main one. They are also blinded by a shortage of night-fighting equipment and their inability to communicate with each other under electronic jamming.

The U.S. and its allies do not have the 3-to-1 superiority in manpower that classic military theory says the attacker should have to be confident of victory. They do hold the great advantage of choosing the point at which they will aim their assault and massing great local superiority there. Using artillery and air attacks with cluster bombs, they will try to knock out Iraqi guns and troop emplacements.

Iraq's artillery is modern and highly capable. Among other things, its arsenal includes hundreds of South African G-5s, probably the best field guns in the world, with a range of more than 20 miles. The artillery force has serious weaknesses, though. First, Iraq has no spotter planes in the air, and its artillerymen will be unable to shoot at anything they cannot see in front of them. Second, almost all the Iraqi guns have to be towed around by trucks. That means they can be pinpointed by allied artillery and aircraft, and the huge quantities of shells piled behind them will make for mighty explosions when hit. If the Iraqis try to move the guns, they will become an inviting target for air attack.

The main allied push, when it comes, will set off large tank battles. Iraq's armored force is the fourth largest in the world. Its most modern battle tanks are the Soviet-built T-62 and T-72, both of which are considered inferior to the U.S.'s M1A1. In any case, the allies will not rely on tank-to-tank combat but will call in air strikes by A-10 Thunderbolts and missile-launching helicopters. In the desert there is no cover for armored vehicles, which churn up a dust cloud behind them wherever they go. "They move, we see 'em," says an A-10 pilot in Saudi Arabia.

Allied engineers will then begin cutting roads through the minefields. At that point, the Republican Guards will have to concentrate their dispersed, dug-in forces and counterattack. The day and night bombardment by B-52s and missile attacks from planes and helicopters will continue. The international forces will quickly be free to roll across Kuwait. "The Iraqis have never faced major maneuver operations," says Cordesman.

With defeat facing him, most analysts believe, Saddam will use every dirty trick at his disposal. He will load his guns and multiple-rocket launchers with chemical weapons and use those weapons in large numbers. They will not be a decisive weapon but may advance his plan to cause as many deaths as possible. He will also fire off his Scuds with chemical warheads, if he has them, at Israel in another attempt to widen the war and crack the coalition.

Saddam's vanished air force may reappear. His best planes -- MiG-29s and F-1 Mirages -- and his French-trained pilots have fled to Iran. But at least 350 others, mostly older MiGs, remain in Iraq in revetments and shelters. He could launch these, armed with conventional or chemical bombs, against the allied ground forces. He might even send some of them on kamikaze-style, one-way missions into Saudi Arabia and Israel. "Saddam appears prepared to lose those aircraft in strikes against us," warns a Pentagon general.

There are other potential Iraqi surprises. Saddam, remembering the damage done to the U.S.S. Stark by an Exocet missile in 1987, could attack allied ships in the gulf with either air-launched or sea-launched Exocets. They would do little damage to a battleship or cruiser but could cause havoc on a destroyer or frigate. It is also possible that Iraqi frogmen might try to swim in and plant mines in Saudi ports or oil facilities.

None of those outrages, even if they succeed, can change the outcome of the war. There is no way Saddam can win militarily, and he must know that. His plan is to win politically and psychologically by spilling allied -- mainly | American -- blood. The longer the allies keep him at arm's length and pound his forces with bombs and missiles, cutting his supply lines, the faster his military power ebbs. His only hope, as his cross-border thrusts showed last week, is to lure the allies into an early ground battle.

The strategic debate over the war's end game is beginning to resemble the one that took place earlier on the effectiveness of economic sanctions. Sanctioneers argued for more time to allow them to work, to disrupt Saddam's military strength. George Bush decided he could not wait. Now air strikes on Iraqi military positions are a kind of sanction with teeth, weakening Iraq's fighting abilities, destroying men and equipment.

General Schwarzkopf promises to stick with the air blitzkrieg until it has achieved its objective. But the pressure to launch the ground attack will soon increase. Says Lawrence Freedman, professor of war studies at King's College, University of London: "The allies won't leave it too long into February because they need to get ((the war)) over during March."

In a few weeks the weather in the gulf will turn hot. The Islamic fast days of Ramadan will arrive, then the pilgrimage of the faithful to the holy cities in Saudi Arabia. Calls to get the war over with will mount. The longer Bush resists them, the better. Allied victory is assured, but the steady pounding of air power will hold to a minimum the bloodshed Saddam is so desperate to inflict.

With reporting by William Dowell/Dhahran, William Mader/London and Bruce van Voorst/Washington