Study Finds Iraq Troop Strength Overestimated : Gulf War: When ground action began, 500,000 foes may actually have been 183,000.

The Pentagon substantially overestimated Iraqi troop strength during the Persian Gulf War, maintaining that the Iraqis had more than 500,000 troops in the theater while the true count may have been as low as 183,000 when the ground war began, according to a new congressional report.

The House Armed Services Committee’s “lessons learned” study asserts that allied intelligence failed to discern that the 42 Iraqi divisions deployed in Kuwait and southern Iraq were severely undermanned at the beginning of the conflict and were depleted by desertions, deaths and injuries during the intense 40-day aerial bombardment that preceded the ground attack.

The finding calls into question previous assessments of the allied ground assault that routed the Iraqi field army in 100 hours, a battle that has been depicted as a masterful display of superior American troops, technology, tactics and training.

“What it says is that at the time of the ground war, when the allied forces were roughly 700,000 people, the enemy could have been as low as 180,000 people, a very significant advantage,” Rep. Les Aspin, chairman of the House panel, said at a briefing Thursday.

“The other thing was, of course, the air campaign produced an enormously demoralized 183,000. . . . You were fighting 183,000 very demoralized, disoriented, confused people who had faced hardships of lack of sleep (and) lack of food because of the air campaign that had been going on for six weeks.”

The Pentagon has already acknowledged most of the findings of the report in its own assessment of the conflict, including the likelihood that Iraqi troop strength was heavily depleted by the time the ground war began. It has steadfastly refused, however, to speculate on the size of the Iraqi force, maintaining that the size of the Iraqi arsenal was more important.

The House committee report highlights a number of U.S. military strengths and weaknesses revealed by the war but cautions against drawing firm conclusions because it was a unique conflict in which all the advantages were held by the allied forces.

The 89-page study affirms that U.S. technology played a decisive role in ending the conflict early. It notes that new precision weaponry was so accurate that only one or two sorties were required to destroy a specific target such as a bridge or a missile battery.

The report also concludes that U.S. forces--both active and reserve--were the best-trained and best-equipped in U.S. history. It praises Congress for passing 1986 military reorganization legislation that gave Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the theater commander, unprecedented autonomy in waging war using forces from all the military services.

But like a much longer Pentagon study on the war released earlier this month, the House report noted several serious deficiencies, among them late and inaccurate battlefield intelligence, poor communication between units and services that led to “friendly fire” casualties, continuing difficulties in dealing with low-technology land and sea mines and the inability of support forces to keep pace with high-speed combat units.

Like its Pentagon counterpart, the congressional report does not address the issue of Iraqi civilian casualties or whether the allies ended the war too soon.

Human rights groups have estimated that bomb damage to the civilian infrastructure of Iraq--power plants, bridges, water purification facilities--led to the deaths of as many as 70,000 Iraqis. The House report only indirectly addresses the problem.