Proxy War: U.S. Facing Soviet Tactics, Weapons : Combatants: Analysts see a laboratory for hypothetical East-West conflict.

The clash between mainly Western and Iraqi forces in the Persian Gulf is providing military analysts in Moscow and Washington with an unparalleled chance to study what a war between the United States and the Soviet Union would be like.

Although the superpowers are on the same side in the Gulf, analysts say the combatants in the Persian Gulf War are as good a proxy for U.S. and Soviet forces as they are likely to see outside of a real Soviet-American war.

Iraq’s air force and army use largely Soviet equipment and doctrine, and the lion’s share of the allied forces in the Persian Gulf follow U.S. military doctrine and use American equipment. Thus, many analysts see the Gulf War as a kind of laboratory for a hypothetical U.S.-Soviet conflict.

“This is as much a Soviet-trained, Soviet-advised and Soviet-equipped army as you’re likely to find around,” Helmut Sonnenfeldt, a former national security official now at the Brookings Institution, says of the Iraqi forces. “They’ve been at it for some 15 years.”

As a result, despite the declared end of the Cold War, defense analysts for both sides are watching the Gulf War closely, not only to learn more about each other’s weapons and tactics, but also to assess how their own equipment and doctrine are faring against those of the other side.

Soviet satellites, repositioned over the region for maximum view, are collecting invaluable data on U.S. intelligence-gathering, use of “smart” weapons such as laser-guided bombs, communication links and general doctrine.

“They are going to school on us, “sopping up everything they can with their elint (electronic eavesdropping) satellites.” says Gen. John Wickham, a onetime U.S. Army chief of staff.

So far, the Soviets seem to have the most grounds for disappointment. Coalition forces lost only about 0.2% of attacking planes in the initial assault, 10 times fewer than anticipated. No U.S. planes have been downed by Soviet surface-to-air missiles, in contrast with their terrible toll over Vietnam.

And Edward Warner, a former Air Force officer now with the RAND Corp., points to several other successes he says are bound to have impressed the Soviets:

* U.S. tactical intelligence has precisely pinpointed targets, even in downtown Baghdad, with intercepted radio signals, photo reconnaissance and other methods.

* The first performances of new weapons such as Stealth F-117s, Tomahawk cruise missiles and the Patriot anti-Scud defense system have been a success.

* The new “reconnaissance-strike” concept, in which airborne radar and other sensors detect stationary and mobile targets and transmit their sightings almost instantaneously to mobile Army ground stations or U.S. attack aircraft, has worked well by any measure.

Two types of “recce-strike” systems are operating over the Arabian desert. One is built into a larger, modified version of the U-2 spy plane. The other, called J-STARS (for Joint Surveillance Target Acquisition Radar System), flies in two old Boeing 707s.

Although this system is still in the developmental stage, the J-STARS aircraft were flown to Saudi Arabia a day before the war began and have performed excellently around the clock since, Aviation Week magazine says.

The U.S. military would obviously benefit from access to data on the weapons supplied to Iraq by the Soviet Union, but the Soviets deny passing on to Washington any information regarding their military relationship with Iraq.

And, as might be expected, the Soviets aren’t playing up the proxy idea. The Soviet military journal Red Star sees the war in a more limited light as a “test bed for weaponry on both sides, but not tactics,” said a U.S. official who keeps close watch on such matters.

And Radio Free Europe reported that a Soviet commentator had sought to “squelch the notion that the Gulf War represented a competition” between U.S. and Soviet weapons. Instead, he declared the issue irrelevant because the Warsaw Pact “had practically ceased to exist.”

Indeed, Lt. Gen. William Odom, former head of Army intelligence now at the Hudson Institute, contends there are some valid reasons for not going too far in viewing the Gulf War as a surrogate for a potential U.S.-Soviet clash.

To begin with, the desert terrain is markedly different from Europe, where battles between North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Warsaw Pact forces were considered most likely to occur.

And in the Gulf War, the roles of the two combatants have been reversed: The European scenario--and Moscow’s own military doctrine--had envisioned that the Soviets would attack, with NATO on the defensive. But U.S.-led forces in the Gulf are waging the attack.

Although Wickham points out that the Iraqi military is not precisely a Soviet clone, it still has adopted--and adapted--much of the Soviets’ doctrine.

Among the prime examples:

* Maskirova, a well-developed Soviet tactic of deception and camouflage.

Iraq has built dummy mobile Scud launchers and aircraft, and even painted fake craters on airport runways and on bomb shelters to suggest possible damage.

There are even some indications that Iraqis may have deceived U.S. intelligence into believing that the Baghdad building in which about 300 civilians were reported killed was a military command post.

* Highly centralized command and control, with virtually all major moves ordered from the top. Unlike American practice, the Iraqi structure permits little flexibility and initiative at lower levels. As communications with the battlefield become ever more disrupted, the defects of such an organization will become increasingly apparent.

* Greater reliance on artillery. Iraq had two to three times more artillery pieces, including some 155-millimeter cannons with far longer ranges than coalition forces. Western forces rely more heavily on weapons to counter enemy artillery, including special radar that directs fire from rocket launchers.

* Well-prepared, triangular “strong points” for battalion-size defense, with earthen ramparts, deep trenches and “killing fire zones” to repel attackers. Soviet army doctrine provides for similar points.

Despite such similarities, officials in Moscow insist that the proxy analogy does not hold water because the weapons and tactics, although Soviet-engineered, are being handled by Iraqis and not by Soviet soldiers and airmen.

U.S. experts agree that Soviet pilots would undoubtedly have flown their planes more skillfully, but RAND’s Warner isn’t sure that would have made much difference in the face of such massive initial allied air strikes.

American forces are largely following the so-called AirLand Battle doctrine, an integrated Air Force and Army concept devised after the Vietnam War. Applied to Europe, it would focus on defense because NATO’s strategy was defensive. Applied to the Korean Peninsula or the Arabian desert, it can be used as an offensive doctrine.

As the name implies, AirLand Battle begins in the air, particularly attacking enemy reserve forces and supply lines in the rear, with the goal of decimating them where they stand and preventing them from massing for a counterattack.

The opening phase of the Desert Storm operation seems to have followed along this line.

Most experts believe that the doctrine will get its first real test when the ground war begins.