Quote:
Originally Posted by Panther Al
Agreed: Field day for a few weeks until we can get enough heavy stuff (Be it armour or air) to really slow him down or stop him - and I'd hate to be one of the airborne speedbumps flown in those first few days. My question is: With Saddam going south, and taking lumps eventually from allied forces, would Iran go west seeing a chance to bite off a chunk of Iraq?
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The primary question is just how much and how fast heavy stuff could have been transported in, remember that it took almost 20 days to ship armor and supplies from CONUS and get them through the Suez Canal, and if Saddam had been able to close the canal down, even if only for a few weeks....the transit time around the Horn of Africa would have added another 15 days easy...the only hope of slowing down Saddam would have been if Egypt had been able to push through two or more corps into the fight, something that would have been very hard to pull off in real life.
As for navy air....the carrier in the Med could have been pulled through the canal within the first days of the fighting, PacFlt could have chopped one and possibly two carriers so the initial support would have been 3 CAWs, maybe 200 combat aircraft? While the Air Force could have shifted 2-3 wings, but its the logistic support that would have been the real stumbling block...in the pre Desert Storm days, it flat out didn't exist in the size needed to take on Iraq at the time.
So with Saddam and the Coalition engaged in a nasty dog fight, would Iran have been able to push. I doubt it. Iran took severe losses in equipment and manpower.