US Soldiers Train for Battle in Streets of Iraq

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Friday, November 01, 2002

US Soldiers Train for Battle in Streets of Iraq

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In the dim pre-dawn light, Sgt. 1st Class Daniel Hendrex's 70-ton Abrams main battle tank rumbles into the narrow streets of a small city where the crew will use the tank's heavy cannon and its many machine guns to flush enemy soldiers hiding in close-by buildings.

Secure behind special armor, the crew scans the battle-scarred buildings through six periscopes and hunts for soldiers in the murk and smoke with a thermal-imaging system that can register body heat where the eye can't see.

But suddenly, so quickly that Hendrex's crew can't react, enemy attackers dart out of nearby cover, leap onto the tank and lay a powerful explosive charge on the top near the turret, where the armor is the thinnest and the Abrams is most vulnerable. Seconds later, a huge explosion disables the behemoth, leaving Hendrex's crew at the mercy of a rapid swarm of enemy soldiers.

If this had been the real thing, the tank would be lost and its crew killed. Luckily, it was just a drill. Part of a massive exercise at the urban warfare training center here last week, the lightning attack on the tank was designed to teach US forces just how difficult it can be to fight inside the confines of a city.

Within months, the Army could learn whether it's ready for the real thing. As the United States edges closer to war with Iraq that could begin this winter, many experts predict that Saddam Hussein will make his final stand in Baghdad. There, he would try to lure US forces into a series of bloody street battles designed to maximize US casualties and break the spirit of Americans.

Few military analysts expect that the Iraqi army -- battered into submission by devastating air and ground attacks during the 1991 Persian Gulf War -- will choose to fight the United States in the desert again.

Instead, Saddam's best hope for survival might be to inflict shocking, Somalia-like horrors on American troops in his capital, and broadcast the images of US-caused civilian carnage to the Arab world.

Fighting battles in the confining grid of a large city is among the most difficult and dangerous things armies do.

A former US commander in the Middle East, retired Marine Corps general Joseph Hoar, envisions a nightmare scenario in which 100,000 of Saddam's best troops hunker down in Baghdad for a block-by-block battle.

''The absolute lesson to be learned from the 1990-91 Gulf War was that you do not take on the United States armed forces in the open desert and expect to win,'' Hoar said last month in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

More likely is that Saddam would defend Baghdad with his fiercely loyal Republican Guard. If that happens, Hoar predicted, ''The result would be high casualties on both sides.''

Military analysts and Pentagon officials say that US strategy will focus on isolating Saddam and his regime while avoiding battles with the Iraqi military wherever possible, especially in cities. But war planners cannot rule out the possibility of combat in Baghdad, a sprawling city of 5 million, or in other populated areas, including Saddam's hometown of Tikrit, north of the capital.

Studying key cities

Barry McCaffrey, a retired Army general who led the 24th Infantry Division to overwhelming victories in the Gulf War, says that before the United States attacks Iraq, the Pentagon will have gathered thorough intelligence on the layout of its key cities, Saddam's chemical weapons sites and his more than 50 sites known as ''presidential palaces.''

But having that knowledge is only part of waging war, he says.

''The biggest mistake people make is to think you can choose a battlefield. You can choose an initial battlefield, and you can choose how you fight. But after that, you don't have a choice of where you fight,'' McCaffrey says.

''We will be under enormous pressure to rapidly enter Iraq, find, seize and destroy his weapons of mass destruction.''

And that, McCaffrey acknowledges, means sending thousands of US ground troops into harm's way.

US intelligence has observed a substantial mosque-building program in Iraqi cities. Intelligence experts believe many of the mosques could be hiding weapons or key Iraqi defense facilities.

Since the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the Pentagon has been preparing soldiers and Marines to fight battles in villages, towns and cities. Those cluttered landscapes had been largely ignored as a training ground since the days of World War II, when GIs slugged their way across Europe by seizing hundreds of hamlets in close combat with the German Army.

The reason for the renewed focus: By the end of this decade, three-quarters of the world's population will live in metropolitan areas. And that's where the US military's top commanders expect to fight, in part because no conventional army would want to battle America's high-tech, smart-bomb equipped force in the open.

At bases from Fayetteville, N.C. to Seattle, the Army and Marines have built scale models of downtown areas to simulate the complexities of urban fighting. Several blocks in size, these artificial cities are used to teach soldiers and Marines a range of skills, from how to spot booby-trapped buildings to fighting enemies who would have no qualms about using civilians as human shields.

The urban warfare training site here at Fort Polk is an example. During last week's training exercise, about 1,000 attackers from the Army's 10th Mountain Division were watched by about as many video cameras, which generated detailed after-battle videotapes to show troops where they went wrong and how they ''died.''

The mock city is named ''Shughart Gordon,'' grim tribute to two Army commandos who won the Medal of Honor for sacrificing themselves to save their comrades in the ferocious urban warfare in Somalia in 1993.

The city is manned by a deadly efficient ''Op For,'' or opposition force, of fighters trained to inflict maximum damage on trainees. To maximize the realism, there is even a cast of civilians, a permanent group of local actors who portray city dwellers and mingle with troops to simulate an environment where it is difficult to tell friend from foe.

Armies have typically lost up to one-third of their forces to death and injury when they move into cities. There, the fighting is often close up and savage. Troops are funneled down narrow streets where ambushes are frequent and attackers are at a disadvantage.

Radios, other tools don't work

In urban warfare, many of the tools that ground troops usually rely on are useless or unavailable. Military radios often don't work beyond a range of several blocks because their signals are blocked by tall buildings and urban electronic clutter. Supporting fire from artillery or aircraft, which ground troops can routinely summon to protect them in encounters on open ground, can be impractical inside cities because of confined spaces or fear of civilian deaths.

The enemy can hide anywhere -- in sewers, perched under piles of rubble or camouflaged as ambulance drivers or firefighters.

''The most challenging thing about urban fighting is the chaos that is increased by the environment,'' says Maj. Jim Lechner, a veteran of the 1993 battle of Mogadishu, Somalia, who is now assigned to an Army infantry brigade at Fort Lewis, Wash.

''You can have rubble blocking streets, smoke everywhere and lots of civilians,'' he says.

Urban warfare can also tie up huge numbers of soldiers. Army and Marine officials say that assaulting, cleaning out and securing just one heavily defended city block can take as many as 150 troops.

''Once you clear a room,'' Lechner says, you have to occupy it physically. ''You can't leave and assume that room is clear because an enemy can come up from the basement or somewhere else.''

The US military has studied two recent examples that demonstrate the brutality of urban fighting. The 1993 ambush of Army Rangers in Mogadishu -- made famous in the book and movie Black Hawk Down -- showed that the United States could win a huge tactical victory yet quickly lose public support for the battle. In 1993, a group of Army Rangers attempting to rescue downed Black Hawk helicopter pilots were ambushed by civilian mobs in Mogadishu.

Dragged through the streets

Despite killing an estimated 1,300 Somalis, most of them fighters, while losing only 18 soldiers, the United States stopped its manhunt for warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid when images of dead Americans being dragged through the streets were broadcast around the world.

''What you learn in a situation like that is, everybody is a potential combatant and every window is a potential defensive position,'' says Army Col. Jim Rabon, a helicopter pilot in Mogadishu in 1993.

The lessons of Somalia aren't hard to understand: Even an impoverished, ill-trained enemy can inflict grave casualties on a professional army that hasn't planned well.

But teaching those lessons or replicating that level of mayhem is more difficult. Some believe the true chaos of urban fighting cannot be simulated in training exercises.

In Mogadishu, for example, communications broke down completely and US forces sent to rescue Army Rangers trapped by Somali mobs could not even find them for several hours.

To prepare to fight in places such as Baghdad, the Pentagon has studied another grim urban landscape: Grozny, the capital of Chechnya.

There, a ragtag band of several hundred rebels inflicted devastating casualties on the Russian army in 1994. The Chechens destroyed entire tank columns, used dead Russian soldiers as shields in their bunkers and cowed a significantly larger force with classic guerrilla methods.

In military circles, the battle has become a tutorial in how not to fight in cities. The Russian army sent poorly trained, undermanned units into battle with poor intelligence.

Among the critical lessons the United States learned that could be applied to Iraq: Never order tanks into cities without foot soldiers to guide and protect them from nimble assaults like the one that ''killed'' Sgt. Hendrex's tank. Make sure troops are equipped with highly detailed maps. Have combat engineers ready to breach obstacles and blow holes in doors and walls.

One potential advantage for the United States: The American military has long taught young officers and enlisted soldiers to act decisively in combat and fight in small groups. The authoritarian Iraqi regime, experts say, has never felt comfortable enough to delegate command decisions.

Saddam also has not armed his civilian population, intelligence experts say, for fear that the population would turn on his regime.

McCaffrey, the Gulf War commander, notes that the Iraqi military is poorly trained, badly equipped and has a track record of quitting when facing a fierce enemy. If the United States uses overwhelming force, the war could be over in three to four weeks, McCaffrey says.

Chemical weapons scenario

One wild card is that Iraq could unleash deadly chemical or biological weapons. But US planners think that if Saddam used such weapons, he would be more likely to aim them at bigger, easier targets such as neighboring countries or US forces massing for an attack.

In the exercise here, attackers were required to have detectors and bulky protective suits at hand, but the defending ''Op For'' never used unconventional weapons.

Conventional weapons were deadly enough. Although the Army declined to issue casualty figures, estimates were that Op For ''killed'' or ''wounded'' more than half of the attackers.

In a real assault, such losses would most likely have caused the US forces to pull back.

Surveying the virtual carnage afterward, Maj. Bryan Hilferty, a spokesman for the Army's 10th Mountain Division, paid tribute to the intensity of the teaching.

''I've been in two wars,'' he said, ''and they were much more pleasant than what happens to our troops at these training centers.''

Source: agencies

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