Learning the Correct Lessons From the Gulf War : Strategy: The U.S. military used tactics that worked for Napoleon and for the Germans in World War II. But how will this victory affect the peace?

Analysts and military experts are now beginning the process of drawing lessons from the Gulf War--trying to determine why one military force so decisively defeated another of equal size, with so few losses to the victor. In recent past, emphasis on sophisticated weaponry caused many to approach warfare with a technological determinism. Clearly, air-delivered precision-guided weapons devastated the Iraqi army’s ability to conduct battlefield operations, and paved the way for the incredible success of the ground battle.

But even in an age of advanced weaponry, skillful strategy should not be devalued. In particular, lessons learned cannot overlook the morale of troops. The Iraqis’ lack of will to fight was perhaps even more important than the high-tech weapons that confronted them.

Few campaigns in history can match the decisiveness of the defeat of an army of half-million men in four days at the cost of only a handful of casualties. The closest historical parallel would be the crushing defeats suffered by Poland, in 1939, and France, in 1940, at the hands of the doctrinally insurmountable German military. Or the equally impressive victory of Israel’s innovative military system over the combined Arab armies in 1967. But another example would be the Battle of Agincourt, in 1415, when the English decimated the closely packed ranks of French Knights with, ironically, the “missile” fire of the English longbow.

Even these modern successes, as decisive as they were, proved costly to the victor. Though overall force levels were much larger, the German armies suffered more than 10,000 killed and almost 50,000 wounded in the first three weeks of the war against France in 1940. The lightning victory of the Israeli army in the 1967 Six-Day War cost Israel almost 1,000 killed and more than 4,000 wounded.

Military analysts are already pointing to the technological advantages of the coalition forces as the basic reason for their military victory. The brevity and astounding success of the ground battle is, in part, due to five weeks of attack by the world’s most technologically advanced arsenal against a country unschooled in high-tech warfare. During the eight-year Iran-Iraq War--which, at the tactical level, resembled the battles of World War I--such weapons played almost no role.

There have been a number of defining periods in modern warfare. The introduction of massive “people’s armies” of the Napoleonic Era is one, as is the strategic mobility of the tank, creating the fluid, highly mobile battlefield. It was the recent advent of precision weaponry and advanced surveillance and targeting that caused some to predict armies could no longer move about the battlefield with the freedom of past wars. According to the emerging concept: What could be seen could be killed. The slaughter of the Iraqi army in Kuwait has, in part, validated this concept.

If not for a brilliance of leadership and creative strategy, warfare would have remained a static process of attrition akin to the appalling display of World War I and, most recently, due to a lack of operational sophistication on either side, in the Iran-Iraq War.

In many ways, the challenge to history’s “Great Captains” has been to surmount the advantages technology provides the enemy while amplifying technology’s contribution to one’s own success. Historical cases of overwhelming military victory reveal that decisive advantage is the result of not just superior technology, but rather a masterful implementation of technology with creative and resourceful doctrine and strategy. In most cases, a healthy dose of military incompetence on the losing side also helps. At the operational level of war, that level between grand strategy and the small-unit tactical level, the coalition forces displayed a true mastery of the battlefield.

It was the commander of the Prussian armies in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, Helmuth von Moltke, who asserted that the day of the offensive, at least at a tactical level, had ended--in the face of concentrated fire from the new, rapid-firing rifles and cannon. He realized soldiers fighting on the defensive had an inherent superiority. He came to this conclusion because he realized soldiers on the offensive offered a larger target to the fire of an often partially hidden defender. To overcome the defenders’ tactical advantage, Moltke used the strategic turning movement--a tactic introduced in modern times by Napoleon.

Napoleon realized the inherent advantage of an army in a strong defensive position. He surmounted this by taking the strategic offensive. In the campaign against the Austrian army at the battles of Marengo and Ulm, Napoleon displayed his favored strategic “turning” movement. By flanking the enemy force, the turning movement compels the defender to begin a withdrawal as the threat to his supply lines becomes evident. Turning movements can produce decisive strategic results, as the defender struggles to escape encirclement and restore his supply lines. Employing this tactic, Napoleon captured a major portion of the Austrian forces. Moltke repeated it in the decisive Prussian victory over the French at the Battle of Sedan in 1870.

The coalition forces of the Gulf War employed the strategic turning movement on a grand scale. In an impressive logistical feat, two full corps moved to the west of Kuwait, in terrain ideal for rapid armored warfare where few Iraqi units were positioned. U.S. commanders applied the offensive principle of distraction and deception to induce Iraq to create a weak point. This is what the Iraqis did, placing their army in a vulnerable position, wide open to a strategic turning movement that unhinged the defense.

This move closely parallels the actions of the German army in France, 1940. Confronted with the heavy fortifications of the Maginot line along the French border, German planners envisioned a wide flanking sweep to turn the French defenses. A German infantry officer, Erich Von Manstein, realized the strategic mobility provided by the tank. He modified the original German plan, shifting the main armored thrust, through the Ardennes, to come only after the original attack farther north, through the Belgium frontier, forced the French to commit their reserve to block the German attack.

U.S. forces exploited the strategic mobility of the helicopter to plunge deep into the enemy’s rear, severing the line of retreat. Few conditions are more devastating to an army’s will to fight than to be surrounded. The foot-borne Iraqi forces in the initial defensive lines were unable to react to the strategic mobility of the U.S. armored forces.

From the strategic to the tactical level the Iraqi military prepared to fight the last war--a static war of attrition dominated by the engineer and the artilleryman. The Iraqi army was destroyed by a U.S. military with a war-fighting doctrine developed over the last 40 years, and only refined in the last few years. The U.S. doctrine stresses rapid movement on a fluid battlefield, seeking out an opponent’s weaknesses while maintaining a high operational tempo to dislocate the enemy force physically and shatter its commanders psychologically.

The Prussian philosopher and strategist Clausewitz said, “The destruction of the enemy armed forces is, among all the other purposes that can be pursued in war, always the one that dominates all others.” He borrowed this idea from Napoleonic strategy. Napoleon wagered his entire strategy on the battlefield victory that would destroy the enemy army--so forcing the enemy to meet his conditions. It remains to be seen whether the destruction of Iraq’s army will lead the Iraqi leadership to accept the conditions as defined by the coalition.