CAMP DOHA, Kuwait, April 4 (UPI) -- The battle FOR Baghdad is over. The battle OF Baghdad is about to begin.
The capture overnight of Saddam Hussein International airport, some 10 miles from the center of the Iraqi capital, brings to an end a stunning victory in two weeks of mobile warfare that reinforces the lessons of the first Gulf War and of Kosovo. The U.S. military machine is unstoppable – and looks set to continue the kind of global dominance that the British enjoyed in the century after their decisive defeat of France's naval power in 1805.
A technological generation ahead of any other military on earth, the U.S. armed forces have built on the lessons of the German blitzkrieg of 1940 to pioneer a new style of war. The German panzer divisions integrated tanks, artillery, mobile infantry and close air support with radio communications – and consistently defeated larger armies.
The Germans lost for three main reasons. First, they never understood sea power, and modern America does (having also learned the lesson of British naval dominance). Second, German logistics were poor. Most of their divisions in 1940 depended on horses to haul their guns, and their logistics failed miserably in the Russian campaign, when German troops froze to death in their light summer uniforms at the gates of Moscow. Third, the German military failed to nurture the national technological and industrial base on which military superiority depended. They produced magnificent weapons, but never enough of them.
None of these weaknesses applies to the current U.S. armed forces, which have long learned the importance of sea and air power. But the real genius of the modern American way of war is the way they have combined their logistics with the best of civilian technology, from communications to information technology. It is one thing to marvel at the way the Vth Corps post office in Kuwait delivers 100 tons of incoming mail a day, quite another to see the massed ranks of PCs in the giant hangars at Camp Doha, with GIs e-mailing home and surfing the Web to see what al-Jazeera or the British media has to say about their war.
The supply systems are stupendous, because the U.S. military has applied the technologies of commercial companies such as Fed-Ex and Wal-Mart to track the use of equipment, locate spare parts through bar codes, and start shipping them forward to the combat troops even before they ask for them. German troops froze for months in their Russian campaigns. American troops outside Nasariya were able to take hot showers less than 48 hours after they reached the place – despite the worst sandstorm in a decade.
As a result, the U.S. armed forces defeated the best army in the Arab world with one hand tied behind their back. The U.S. Army did not even field its first team. The 4th Division, the most technologically advanced of all, with a computer in every vehicle and TV camera on the helmet of every squad leader sending real-time images back to headquarters, never even arrived on the battlefield.
The tank-heavy Iraqis, trained and equipped according to the Soviet theories of armored warfare, were defeated by an outnumbered U.S. force that did not even contain an armored division. They were beaten by one U.S. mechanized infantry division (the 3rd), one Airborne division (the 101st) and a Marine Expeditionary Force fighting further from shore than any Marine unit before them. They had the backing, on a secondary front, of one reinforced British armored brigade.
This has been a campaign for the history books, an example of modern blitzkrieg that will convince every other military on Earth that there is no future in taking on the Americans. As a result, they will have to think in terms of asymmetric warfare, in ways to achieve their political goals by avoiding an all-out military confrontation.
They will look for an equalizer – like nuclear weapons. North Korea's salesmen are going to become very popular. They will look very hard at deniable terrorist surrogates. And they will study carefully the guerilla attacks the Iraqi paramilitary staged against U.S. supply lines to work out how and why it went wrong. They will work at information warfare, to see if those awesome American communications networks and computer-dependent logistics can be disrupted.
Above all, they will study the new campaign that is about to take place in the battle OF Baghdad, the first time in its history that the U.S. armed forces have taken on a contested city of 5 million people. The U.S. commanders know what the cities of Leningrad and Stalingrad did to the blitzkrieg experts of 1940. To avoid that fate, and demonstrate the flexibility in the face of new challenges that really tests an army's mettle, the victors of Blitzkrieg 2003 have to learn some asymmetric tactics of their own.
