>anti-material sniper rifles>atgms>manpadsSuch wunderwaffe wouldve wrought havoc on Coalition troops and their local allies at Afghanistan and Iraq, and yet they didntWhat gives?
>>65120923>AfghanistanBecause their neighbors knew better than to arm tribals with advanced hardware. Anything you give them WILL be used against you after the Americans leave. Which is exactly what happened.
The Iraqis only had a handful of kornet launchers before the invasion, many were captured and those left were quickly expended. Igla and strelas were around and did bring down some aircraft over the years, but simply weren't common enough or spread widely enough to matter. AMRs weren't really a feature of early GWOT, they were a major fixture of Syria but Iraq and Afghanistan were basically already pacified by the time that kicked off.
>>65120923Saddam didn't manage to get his hands on that many ATGMs prior to the Iraq War, and Saddam's old weapons stockpiles were what Iraqi insurgents mostly armed themselves with. And yes, they did just chuck anti-tank RPG warheads at Coalition Humvees/Bradleys/trucks quite a bit. The urban layout and architecture of Iraq is more suitable to use IEDs and dumb RPGs to ambush thin-skinned vehicles anyway. As for Afghanistan, it isn't really tank country. The few MBTs that the US did send to Iraq didn't really accomplish much because ultra-mountainous terrain and extremely heavy tracked vehicles don't mix.
>>65120944I personally think part of this is that soldiers intended for internal security (ie putting down rebels) generally don't need ATGMs, which are a fairly expensive system difficult to produce domestically. If you mostly expect to be shooting at kurdish insurgents, you don't really need a huge stockpile of advanced ATGMs. And, as North Korea demonstrates, its pretty hard to maintain an army capable of defending the country against foreign invasion from a coalition of world powers AND build an army specialized to keep your population subjugated.
>>65120965yeah. By the year 2002 or so, the Iraqi armed forces were equipped to deal with internal rebels and Kurds, not a modern mechanized army. To play devil's advocate, Saddam was no fool when it came to understanding what political objectives his armed forces could/should be equipped to face. He thought he was able to maybe win major showdowns with the US, Israel and Iran throughout the 1980s, and thus, he bought shitloads of MBTs, AFVs and MiGs/French fighter aircraft to kit out his army. After that didn't prove to be a winning formula and he got BTFO in the Persian Gulf in 1991, he correctly realized that he couldn't really ever hope to directly face down the West and Israel in a conventional land, sea, or air war, so he restructured the Iraqi air force to be SAM-heavy to harass American aircraft during Desert Fox as much as possible, restructured the Navy to be as similar to the Iranian IRGC as possible (hordes of asymmetric speedboats with ASBMs and commandos to harass civilian shipping to gain disproportionate economic/geopolitical leverage), and restructured the Army and Republican Guard equipment and doctrine-wise to function in a semi-irregular, semi-insurgent manner with its main purpose being to suppress internal rebellion and massacring Kurds/major clans that stepped out of line.The reason the Iraqi Insurgency got so out of hand in the mid-late 2000s was because everybody with every Iraqi with military experience or training was already semi-'guerillla-ized', and many of them joined the insurgents.
>>65120983>and many of them joined the insurgentsCoalition policies making every Baathist unemployable overnight left them with few other options, short of leaving the country. Not disagreeing, but pointing out that trained Iraqis joining the insurgents wasn't necessarily an ideological decision.
>>65121003Yeah it wasn’t an ideological decision. That doesn’t change the fact that the knowledge on how to conduct irregular guerilla warfare was widespread in Saddam’s military from the mid-1990s onwards because that was doctrinally what he knew it needed to be.
>>65120983How would Saddam's pre-1991 military fare against Israel? On one hand, I'd imagine he get btfo as soon as the Israelis get air superiority, on the other hand, he did manage to rally a 1 million man army in the Iran war, something no Arab country had ever done to this day.
>>65123807>How would Saddam's pre-1991 military fare against Israel?he had about 3x to 4x more hardware than the Arabs did in Yom Kippur, but he would have to attack on one front and through pretty bad terrainand he did have a pretty powerful air defence system that shot down dozens of Coalition aircraft one way or another, and the Israelis don't actually have a lot of jetsthe Israelis would win but their standing army and air force would probably be wiped out, and the populace would take quite a few casualties from Scud bombardment, I think
