European Stars and Stripes (Newspaper) - December 28, 1990, Darmstadt, Hesse                                By Robert c. Toth los Angeles times Iraq has 4,000 tanks in Kuwait and Southern Iraq twice the number deployed by  forces in the persian Gulf and it boasts similar advantages in numbers of artillery and. Troops. By february the opposing armies will be More evenly balanced but the Odds still will not favor a ground War to Force Iraq out of Kuwait. According to a military Rule of thumb attackers need a 3-1 advantage to have a reasonable Chance of Success. Yet All signs Point to a full scale ground assault by . And Allied forces As the Centrepiece of the Bush administrations military strategy if War comes to the Gulf. A and the administration appears confident of a Quick and decisive Victory. Why  not dissuaded by the numbers history is Replete with cases in which smaller forces have won against larger numbers a Hiller s defeat of Franco in the Early Days of world War ii is one example a because of Superior weaponry and other factors. A1986 army report cited a study of nine Battles in which attackers won in nearly half the cases in which a the attacker is a outnumbered by Between 1 -3 and 2-3.�?� moreover computer models of ground warfare support the administrations Promise of an overwhelming Victory. An army assessment of american and soviet made iraqi equipment a from tanks to rifles a shows that the United states has a decisive Edge in Quality that would compensate for its numerical. Disadvantage. For example the chief Battlefield weapon is the tank and an m1a1 tank is assessed As More than 30 percent belter than an iraqi t-72 tank because of. Its greater firepower Maneule ability and protective Armor. Three mis Are considered to be Worth Fourt-72s. Similar technical superiority exists in most other weapon systems according to a the assessment. . Multiple launch. Rocket systems have 12 times the effectiveness of Iraq s 155mm howitzer artillery. And in the key category of attack helicopters the advantage is theoretically infinite since Iraq has none while the United states has More than 400. When such assessments Are factored into the opposing ground combat units and the forces Are pitted against each other in. War games the conclusion by Pentagon. And Many non government experts seems to be the same a a we a crush them a said Joshua a. Epstein of the Brookings a v institution. Iraqi numbers including its million Man army simply should not be a problem added Barry r. Posen of the. Massachusetts Institute of technology. Quot if. Anything,.we might begin to address the ethical question of How much Slaughter you want to inflict on his forces if War . There Are doubters nonetheless. A however advanced the modelling a techniques All of the experts,.including Epstein and Posen warn that unknown and unpredictable events could turn the most modern technological projections into bloody catastrophe. S 4 a. It. Soldiers demonstrate the use of a Bangalore torpedo used for blasting a path through mine Fields or barbed wire. Quot they let you get your brain around the. A  v a ground warfare equations were invented after world War i by a British meteorologist Frederick William Lanchester to predict the interaction and attrition of forces based largely on the technical characteristics of weapons and terrain. In simplistic terms models typically dealt with the question of How Many casualties per hour would be suffered if x. Number of shells were fired per hour. Against y number of troops with z the. Amount of their Protection. The first Side to lose a significant proportion of its Force a j Between to percent and 30 percent a would break or surrender. A a a Lanchester a models worked Well where applied retrospectively to world War i and the. American civil War both of which were essentially Static or a set piece Quot wars but a the approach Falls apart when rapidly r Mobile forces Are introduced As occurred in world War ii when the Shock effect of tank attacks produced a psychological collapse that required entire units to be withdrawn from Battle. And it did not work for Vietnam. Computer modelling for a ground War is based on assessments by the u. S. Army War gaming Agency of the combat value and combat effectiveness of 10 types of weapons a a. The army Survey which evaluated virtually athe weapons in the world was once top secret but was made Public several years ago. It concentrated on . And soviet weapons that were already in production or projected for manufacture by 1993. 1 Gen. Colin Powell chairman of the joint chiefs of staff end Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf commander of . Forces in the Gulf together in Riyadh last week during Powell a visit to saudi Arabia. / chief among the worries of professional a soldiers ,. \ a # will the. Air War go As advertised probably yes because air combat turns far More on the technical characteristic of weapons than does ground warfare and both Model builders and professionals. Have concluded that  air forces will. Seize control of the skies. But if that control does not translate into an effective advantage a. If the iraqis can absorb air strikes like the vietnamese did during the Vietnam War for instance the ensuing a ground War will go on longer and be far a More costly they say. A a Willi he�?T. All Volunteer never before tested military hold up in combat. Again probably yes but in ,. . Forces have performed poorly at first Learned quickly and then done very Well Quot we wont have that kind  to learn. Here a warned a . Expert familiar with Pentagon concerns computer Mode shave their flaws but they Are far belter than Quot bean counting Quot Quot a which is How the experts refer to simply adding up the numbers of troops and. Weapons on each Side. Quot they Don t work a perfectly Quot one expert said Quot but they re All a. You have really that attempts to Factor a Quality into the  \ Quot models have All the defects of big indexes but the have the advantage of sweeping away detail Quot Epstein explained the tank Quot Queen of the Battlefield Quot in chess terms a was arbitrarily made the Standard. The . M60 tank was Given an Page 16 the stars and stripes Friday december 28, 1990