Do you understand the difference between Iraqi military force of the period (1980 - 1982) and the world's best equipped and funded military force of the 21st century?
Iraqi military force of the period (1980 - 1982) had glaring shortcomings due to which it was not up to the task of occupying Iran.
1. Shortsighted leadership
The major problem, however, lay in the fact that Saddam’s leadership style had so politicized the army's senior levels that few, if any, generals were able, much less willing, to provide the dictator with honest assessments of the actual situation. Early in the conflict, "yes men" so dominated the Ba'athist regime's military decision-making processes at every level that only major defeats were going to alter the picture. Deployed into the territory seized from the Iranians, the Iraqi army was unprepared for the initial onslaught of the Iranians. Many of these attacks depended on religious fanaticism alone for success. Meanwhile, given the optimistic reports he was receiving from senior commanders, Saddam remained ignorant of the tactical vulnerabilities of his forces.
Emphasis mine. No matter what type of army, leadership should be wise, smart and enabling. This wasn't the case with Saddam Hussein because to him his claim to the throne was top priority and this is why he surrounded him with "yes men types."
2. Lack of planning and preparations
The extent to which the decision for war surprised the Iraqi military is suggested by the fact that the navy's senior officers were not informed of the decision to invade until September 20, 2 days before the invasion. As a result, two major naval units—floating batteries comprised of modified landing craft equipped with artillery—remained in Basra where they were refitting and undergoing overhaul and maintenance. Thus, the outbreak of war trapped them above the Shatt al-Arab and they had to be transported over land to Umm Qasr. With regard to the air force, the plans for the air attack on September 22, which were supposed to replay the devastating Israeli attack on the Egyptian Air Force in June 1967, were not delivered to the attack squadrons until September 20, so there was no time for rehearsals. Even then, the plans described the upcoming operation as a training exercise. Most of the crews did not know they were embarking on active operations until a few hours before takeoff. The failure to examine the strategic and operational implications of war with Iran was disastrous for Iraq’s opening moves. This was true for all the services: the navy simply assumed a defensive posture, the air force launched uncoordinated and ineffective attacks, and the army advanced on a number of different axes, none of which were mutually supporting, with the apparent goal of simply taking possession of Iranian territory. In other words, there was little tactical and no operational focus to the Iraqi military operations of September 22, 1980.
Emphasis mine. Saddam Hussein ordered the Iraqi armed forces to invade Iran on short notice, without giving them sufficient time and space to prepare for this daring move and come up with a coherent plan-of-action. An army marching into the hostile territory without clear objectives and preparation is doomed to fail.
Not surprisingly, there was no joint planning, much less coordination among the services. For example, although it provided some support by firing Katyusha rockets into the cities from landing craft, the navy participated little in the fighting around Khorramshahr and Abadan. Had there been coordination, the Iraqi navy might have helped bottle up Iranian torpedo boats and cut off Iranian resupply efforts for the besieged Iranian garrison at Abadan.
3. Logistics problems and limited situational awareness
Woods: Why were the Iranians so confident that the Iraqi forces would not advance? Was this knowledge of the practical limits of the number of forces Iraq had, and the amount of the logistics the Iraqis could push forward? What was the limiting factor for Iraq at that point in May 1981?
Hamdani: This was a fact of the war. Where could we go, if we wanted to advance to a certain depth in Iran? For example, let us say that as a division commander you wanted to go more than 40 kilometers into Iranian territory, what would be the point? Going this far would not get you any closer to Tehran, because it would still be another 800 kilometers to the Iranian capital. So this imposed a natural limit on the Iraqi offensives. We began to assume a more defensive position. We did not have the capability to push a division 30–40 kilometers into Iran, and such an advance would not have put an end to the war. Our strategy had to become defensive because of the depth of their territory. Cities like Tehran and Isfahan were far too deep in their nation. We knew we no longer had the capability to advance, except using aircraft, which possessed sufficient range.
The lack of a strategic purpose translated into a lack of clarity for the upcoming campaign. There was an underlying assumption that the Iraqis, like the Israelis in 1967, would win a Blitzkrieg victory. But how military force was going to accomplish such a victory without clear operational or tactical goals was a mystery that Saddam and those surrounding him were incapable of examining. Instead, the Iraqi Army trundled into Iran with the hope that something might turn up. What turned up was completely unexpected: an extended war of attrition in which the existence of the Ba'athist regime was at stake. Adding to the difficulties that were to plague the Iraqis in their advance was the fact that they possessed no up-to-date maps and, in some cases, no maps at all of the territory through which their forces would advance. Thus, 9 Iraqi divisions, as General Makki put it, drove down the 9 separate roads across the Iran–Iraq border. Without maps or information about the terrain through which they would advance, a number of formations got lost while others failed to reach their goals because of the difficulties they confronted crossing swampy areas. Most of the invading units eventually stopped because they had reached the end of their logistic tether; others stopped because they ran into Iranian resistance, as was the case at Khorramshahr. There, the attacking armored units, which possessed no infantry support for fighting in urban terrain, ran into fanatical Iranian militia. Eventually the infantry support arrived, but by then the Iranians had reinforced the city with substantial numbers of Pasdaran militia. The result was a blood bath that wrecked several Iraqi units including the Iraqi 33rd Special Forces Brigade.
4. Poor equipment
Iraqi Air Force was lacking in precision-guided munitions and penetrative capacity
Emulating Israeli tactics used in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, Hussein sent formations of MiG-21s in a preemptive strike against Iran's air bases at Mehrabad, Ahwaz, Dezful, and Abadan, but failed to destroy Iran's air force on the ground. Iranian jets were housed in hardened shelters and survived intact; Iraqi bombs designed to crater runways could not destroy Iran's spread-out airfields. Within hours, Iranian F-4 Phantoms took off from the airfields, attacking strategic targets near major Iraqi cities. Although Iran's 100 sorties were not especially effective, they shot down two aircraft and surprised the Iraqis; the Iranians also used helicopters to fly transport and attack missions. The Iraqi air force, with at least a 3-to-1 numerical advantage, virtually abandoned the skies to preserve its planes.
Iraqi Air Force was not capable of providing CAS to Iraqi Army either.
Not surprisingly, close air support for ground forces was non-existent, while, as General Kabi, former commander of naval forces, suggested, there was a complete wall between the navy and the air force until 1982. Conversations with the generals involved in air and naval operations suggest there was no significant improvement in cooperation between the two services through the end of the war.
Iraqi Army was equipped with Soviet main battle tanks (MBT) such as T-55 and T-62. These MBT are not suitable for penetrating roles, rather effective in packs out in the open. They were easy pickings for low-cost RPG in urban environments.
Iraqi armed forces did not had night vision capabilities either. Advanced weaponry such as cruise missiles; anti-radiation missiles; bunker busters; EMP-type munitions = NO.
5. Intelligence failure
Undergirding the faulty assumptions with which Iraqi leaders embarked on war was a general intelligence failure. The essential belief among regime leadership was that the Iranians and Khomeini would be pushovers in any major war. The overall result was that Iraqi forces came to rest after advancing for approximately two weeks. There were two disastrous results of this ill-conceived and ill-planned invasion.
First, the Iraqis failed to achieve defensible positions that might have improved their prospects for holding onto their territorial gains. The failure to block the passes out of the Zagros Mountains allowed the Iranians easy access to redeploy their ground forces from bases largely in the north and center of the country, to the plains of the south, where most of the fighting occurred. This simplest of mistakes underlines the baleful impact of Saddam’s choices of military leaders based on their loyalty to his person and the Ba'ath Party rather than military experience and competence. In effect, they contributed little to the decision-making and planning processes during the pre-war period. Additionally, the decision to halt in front of Dezful rather than advance beyond that city meant that the key highway running from the Zagros Mountains and Tehran in the northeast to the east of Dezful and on to Ahvaz and the front by Khorramshahr allowed the Iranians to deploy and then support the southern front relatively easily throughout 1981 and 1982.
Equally deleterious to Iraqi prospects for the next 18 months was the decision for divisions to defend where they had halted without regard for the defensibility of the terrain or the nature of the forces. In spite of Saddam's decision that Iraqi forces would advance no farther, there was no redeployment from an offensive to a defensive stance. There was no reorganization that could have placed armored units in the rear as a maneuver, counter-attack force with the infantry as a covering force. A possible explanation for the refusal to redeploy may have been Saddam's desire to hold onto every bit of territory his soldiers had captured in the first weeks of the conflict in order to gain a position of strength for a negotiated settlement. It never occurred to him that Iraqi forced might have reached their culmination point.
Furthermore, more than 9 attacking divisions were spread across the front in positions from which they were scarcely able to defend themselves, much less support other units, while there was no central reserve. Thus, the defensive positions the Iraqi defenders assumed made no sense either operationally or tactically. Luckily for Saddam, the Iraqis did not pay too heavy a price in 1980 and early 1981, because as Iraqi intelligence estimates had correctly surmised, the Iranians were unprepared to effectively defend themselves—in the near term. However, by early 1982, that situation had changed as the Iranians got their act together. At that point in the war, Iraqi incompetence almost led to the destruction of their army and the fall of the Ba'athist state.
At the heart of Iraq's difficulties lay the incompetence of its senior military leaders. In particular, General Shanshal, the army chief of staff from 1970 through the first defeats in 1981, proved incapable of making decisions. This was the result of Shanshal's unwillingness to take responsibility for his actions, undoubtedly due to Saddam's penchant for punishing those who, in his view, had erred. Comfortable and knowledgeable of the political milieu within which Saddam's court acted, the army chief of staff provided a constant diet of information about the war agreeable to the dictator's instincts. As General Makki in his interview suggests, the framework of decision-making at the senior levels of the Iraqi military revolved more around the fear of what Saddam might do than what the Iranians might do.
Clear enough?
REFERENCES
https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/146268/Saddams Generals.pdf
https://ndupress.ndu.edu/Portals/68/Documents/Books/saddams-war.pdf
https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/daily/military-history/new-borders-old-enemies-the-iran-iraq-war/
NOTE: I am not trying to project Iraqi military capability as being utterly inept, and neither I am trying to belittle courage shown and sacrifices rendered by Iranian forces. However, one needs to understand why Iraqi offensive missions in Iran flopped during the period (1980 - 1982).
Big deal you guys defeated a poorly equipped and led force in the early 1980s. Neutral observers are like YAWN.
Iraqi military capabilities did take a leap at a later stage (1986 - 1990); lot of improvements across the board during these years. Unfortunately for Iraq, Saddam's lack of foresight and pragmatism....
This too.
Right.
Once again, which army I am alluding to? Certainly not IDF.
IDF failed in Lebanon in 2006 because Israeli leadership was trying to execute an Operation Desert Storm of its own, and IDF was not given the green light to invade Lebanon early on. This lack of initiative gave Hezbollah sufficient time to dig in and prepare for the inevitable.
Secondly, Israeli armor such as Merkava series MBT had lot of hype but failed to deliever in penetrating roles.
I have argued on a consistent basis in this forum that American Abrams series MBT are most capable in penetrating roles. These MBT receive Depleted Uranium armor treatment which make it possible for them to withstand otherwise potent blows, and this armor treatment is not for EXPORT, not even to NATO members and Israel. American armed forces are superior to any other in numerous domains by far.
Study following military operations:-
1. Operation Desert Storm (1991)
2. Operation Iraqi Freedom (2003)
Both are brilliantly executed operations and emulations of Blitzkrieg style of warfare with no parallels in operational excellence throughout history.
However, both were executed in a remarkably different manner from each other - this is very important consideration because every war is different and YOU need to plan and execute a military operation according to the apparent nature and mindset of the ENEMY you are trying to overcome.
Advances on the ground in a span of just 100 hours (Operation Desert Storm):-
Advances on the ground in a span of only 21 days (Operation Iraqi Freedom):-
Distance between Basrah and Baghdad is 531 KM.
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What Iraq and Iran managed against each other:-
No comparison.
