Desert Storm (1991): Why this success?

nemrod wrote:

sheytanelkebir wrote:my 2 cents on this important and often overlooked topic.

....Iraq's fighter interceptors were "not bad" by regional standards:
MiG23ML with R24 (about 40 aircraft)
MiG29 with R27R (about 35 aircraft)
MiG25 with R40 (about 20 aircraft)
Mirage F1 with Super530F (about 60 aircraft)

That gave the Iraqis a quite formidable self-defence capability against the likes of Iran, Turkey or Syria... but it was nothing against the USA of course.

Thx for you contribution.
Could you please tell us more about Iraqis fighters performances ?
Regards.

sheytanelkebir wrote:
...anyway there were many many "lessons learned" from that brief war.

TR1 wrote:Will we ever find out why Sadaam thought the Iranian exodus was a good idea?

sheytanelkebir wrote:true losses were reported quite accurately by the allies AFAIK. just sometimes the "cause" of losses were not accurate (which is understandable as its rarely clear how "the other" shot down your aircraft).

The allies on the other hand overclaimed their kills against the Iraqis (also natural, as many shots were BVR and no physical way to "verify" the kills)... and they UNDERCOUNTED the number of aircraft they destroyed on the ground in Hardened aircraft shelters (the true "destroyer" of the Iraqi AF).. also understandable since they didn't have access to those HAS after the war to count how many planes were inside...

...true losses were reported quite accurately by the allies AFAIK

On 2 February 1991, B-52G Hulk 46, assigned to the 4300th Bomb Wing (Provisional), Diego Garcia, British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) crashed while returning from a bombing mission in Iraq during the Persian Gulf War. The crash was eventually blamed on a catastrophic failure of the aircraft's electrical system. Three of the six crew members on board were killed

GarryB wrote:
Su-15 was a PVO interceptor and AFAIK was never exported outside the Soviet Union.

GarryB wrote:If it went to Egypt there is no way it was flown by Egyptians... no disrespect to Egyptian pilots... these were the aircraft defending Soviet Air Space... there is no way they would want to compromise them to anyone.

sheytanelkebir wrote:Just to continue on the topic of the mythical iraqi made T72 tanks "assad babil".

Iraqis over on the iraqi military forum whonwere active officers and in taji say that not a single T72 was built in Iraq. Some were assembled from complete knock down kits where every single part down to nuts and bolts were made in Poland and Russia. Yet there persists the factoid of the "inferior iraqi made T72" perhaps as a way of explaining away it's lack of success against Abrams tanks ..  Yet so far the proponents of this view have not show actual evidence of such a tank... And we now have plenty of pics of taji and iraqi tanks and modifications of all type... (SEE iraqi military forum).

Mike E wrote:

sheytanelkebir wrote:Just to continue on the topic of the mythical iraqi made T72 tanks "assad babil".

Iraqis over on the iraqi military forum whonwere active officers and in taji say that not a single T72 was built in Iraq. Some were assembled from complete knock down kits where every single part down to nuts and bolts were made in Poland and Russia. Yet there persists the factoid of the "inferior iraqi made T72" perhaps as a way of explaining away it's lack of success against Abrams tanks ..  Yet so far the proponents of this view have not show actual evidence of such a tank... And we now have plenty of pics of taji and iraqi tanks and modifications of all type... (SEE iraqi military forum).

They were assembled *in Iraq* using parts from *Poland/Russia* and *Iraq*. It is an Iraqi modification, as I have been saying. Simply looking at it shows you its inferiority to Soviet and post-Soviet -72's.


http://www.kentimmerman.com/news/tdl16.htm


"The Taji weapons complex provided one of the keys to Saddam's ambition. Already, Thyssen Rheinstahl of West Germany had built a steel plant at Taji, which was churning out the basic materials needed for a wide variety of weapons. Since 1986, Ferrostaal and dozens of West German subcontractors were building a "universal forge" at Taji, with the full knowledge and approval of the Bonn government. According to documents quoted Hans Leyendecker and Richard Rickelmann of Der Spiegel and interviews with German customs officials, the plan was to build 1,000 artillery pieces per year at Taji, in calibers ranging from 105 mm to 203 mm.
And in a separate production unit built by Kloeckner Industries of West Germany, Iraqi tanks were being rebuilt. In addition to retrofitting older T-54 and T-62, Iraqi officials say they began to assembly the newer T-72 in Taji in early 1989, in a license agreement signed with Bumar-Labedy of Poland. They called the new tank the "Asad Babil," or Lion of Babylon. But Iraqi armaments engineers, such as Lt. General Amer Rashid, were not content with just assembling the tanks from knock-down kits. They argued that once you factored in the cost of building the plant, kit assembly did not lead to any appreciable savings in the overall unit cost of the tank. He and his colleagues at MIMI wanted Taji to become a huge military and civilian steel manufacturing center for all sorts of applications, including tank bodies and tank armor. To finance it all, they turned to the BNL branch in Atlanta."


Taji was a production powerhouse... You claim no Asad's were built there but everything points to the exact opposite. In fact, from what I've heard, T-72M's were stationed there after Saddam's downfall because they could receive maintenance and new parts *from the Taji production facility*.


Iraq had the steel needed to produce vehicles...and captured Asad's seem to make it apparent they were indeed made using Iraqi steel. Iraq even laminated more steel on top as I'm sure you know.


Nothing points to the Asad not being an Iraqi vehicle except for a few members on a forum.

sheytanelkebir wrote:There is no forge in Taji to make tanks hulls / turrets. If there is show me a picture.

Like I said. the tanks are 100% imported. by "kits" the tanks came assembled mechanically only electronics were installed etc locally.

There is not a single "iraqi made" T72 tank ever built. Every single T72 tank that fought in 1991 and 2003 was built in USSR or Czechoslovakia or Poland.


The fact that a simple "lie" was propagated and copied and circulated for so long doesn't make it fact. The US occupied Taji for 9 years. They never seem to have found this mythical tank forge... because it didn't exist. Taji has warehouses for overhaul of all types of equipment. Next door there is a factory for making missiles (its outside Taji)... they also make "add on armour" for different vehicles there as well as make their "franken" models (BTR-50 with EE-9 turret etc...), but they never ever built (as in FORGED STEEL) a single T72 tank there.

and the onus is on providing "positive" evidence... the quotation you wrote above is from a book released in 1990... (imagine if we, today insisted that what happened in USSR was in line with a book written in the US in 1990).



just a disclaimer from me. I worked in a company in Baghdad in 2011, and one of the projects our company did was building the mil helicopter overhaul facility at Taji so I had the opportunity to interact with Taji insiders. I personally never went inside Taji though (i worked on different projects).



there are of course many similar lies propagated about Iraq from the 1990 gulf war period that seem to have lingered purely because no one is interested in debunking them ... for example Iraq's "baghdad tunnel networks" (a small semi-recessed bomb shelter between the rasheed hotel and Conference Centre) amongst other howlers which were designed to "present" Iraq more as a 4th Reich in 1990 than as a small developing country (which it was).

GarryB wrote:Whether Iraq made the T-72s that were used in DS or just assembled parts made elsewhere is not that important.

What is important is that the models they had in DS were very different from the models the Soviets had in service, and that fighting in open desert terrain with no air cover and the enemy controlling the skies just compounded their problems.

flamming_python wrote:

Walther von Oldenburg wrote:Iraqi T-72s were almost the same as Soviet T-72A from late 1970s=early 1980s. Only T-72B (introduced in 1985) was better. These tanks would fare excellent against M60s and early model M1s or Leo2s with some poor ammo - but my understanding is that only T-80U and T-72B could fight with M1A1 on equal grounds.

Information is also crucial - if you know where your enemy is but he does not know where you are - you can dictate where and how to fight

I wonder - if Iraqis were more competent (let's say, like Serbs in 1999) - would they be able to inflict high casualties on the coalition forces - a few thousand dead for example? AFAIK the most pessimistic analysts predicted 700 killed and most estimates were in the range of 3000-7000 killed coalition soldiers - while the entire campaign concluded with less than 400 casualties. This war is easily in the top 10 of the most lopsided conflcits in the history of mankind.

You're a funny guy.

Due to UN Sanctions, Iraq wasn't able to receive T-72M/T-72M1s whole; so they sourced parts from different Warsaw Pact nations in order to assemble these tanks on their own territory.
The end tanks tended to vary in their features, with the better ones going to the Republican Guard; they were somewhere between the T-72M and T-72M1 in their capabilities.

However, you can't compare them to T-72As - the Iraqi T-72s had similar armour; but optical rangefinders as opposed to laser ones, and no electronic FCS. Also they had obsolete night-vision equipment. Another thing was their ammo, which was subpar compared to standard Soviet tank rounds at the time.

However that's only part of the story; the Iraqis in fact only managed to get a few hundred such locally assembled T-72M/T-72M1s in service.

The rest of their T-72s were actually hybrids that the Iraqis later built due to difficulty acquiring parts, with even more downgraded capabilities and using local components.
The first of these was the Saddam, with low-quality local parts, no shock absorbers and simplified electronic systems, with an IR searchlight in lieu of a proper night-vision system.
But this was nothing compared to the Asad Babil; with severely downgraded armour due to the front-hull and turret armour array supplies having run out; and Iraq having to improvise with its own industries. The Asad Babil also had a normal searchlight instead of an IR one.

Another detail is that Soviet T-72As went through several factory iterations, the last edition to be produced before the introduction of the T-72B had stronger base armour compared to the '79 T-72As, anti-radiation lining and Kontakt-1 ERA.