Saddam's Qadissiya: The Evolution of Iraqi Operational Warfare during the Iran-Iraq War, 1980-1988

Abstract

Despite being the subject of much debate, the Iraqi armed forces during the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988 has rarely been studied at the cutting-edge of battle. Rarer still has been any attempt to analyse the confrontation from the perspectives of Iraqi officers who commanded large formations, planned campaigns, and fought a determined Iranian enemy filled with revolutionary zeal bent on first defending their territory against a botched Iraqi invasion before attempting to invade Iraq itself for most of the rest of the war. This thesis will trace the evolution of the Iraqi military’s performance during the Iran-Iraq War at the operational level of war. It will rely heavily on the eyewitness accounts of former Iraqi senior officers in addition to the extant corpus on the subject of the war that has been gradually growing over the past four decades. The analysis will rely upon “Fighting Power” as an analytical framework, composed of examining the conceptual, moral, and physical components of an armed force. Specifically, the version of Fighting Power and its definitions adopted by the British Army will guide the analysis while not being prescriptive or formulaic. The central argument to this thesis will be that the Iraqi military began the war with a low level of Fighting Power, lacking a sound conceptual and offensive doctrinal basis upon which they could invade neighbouring Iran, being in need of better trained, more flexible forces and physical capabilities, and were deficient in the moral component needed to motivate men to fight and die on the field of battle. By the end of the war, and through a painstaking evolutionary process, Iraq had improved all three aspects of Fighting Power, developing superior conceptual tools, physical attributes, and moral foundations than its adversary, ultimately leading to triumph on the battlefield by 1988.