I know I am going to get some questions about Kurdish Dragon. Is the operational concept realistic? Could an American armored brigade and a light armor brigade actually attack an Iraqi division and destroy it as I describe? Could the casualty levels be that low? The answer is, yes. During the Gulf War once the ground forces were turned loose, American forces rampaged through Iraqi units. The most famous battle was at 73 Easting, but there were other battles as well. Company-sized American units destroyed battalion-size Republican Guard units, battalion-size units destroyed whole brigades, and battle casualties were almost non-existent, at least by historical records. In the fifteen years hypothetically intervening, American forces have gotten stronger and much more advanced. Most of the technical and military people all agreed the scenario could have unfolded the way I laid it out.
One of the problems with writing this chapter was that while the military advertises how fast they can mobilize a division and get it somewhere in the world, the figures they give are as fictional as this story. They might say that an armored division could be on board a ship in a few days, and at sea for 7-10, and then unload and immediately go into battle, but that’s not true. The only way it happens that fast is if everybody is on the base, the flatbeds and trains are lined up and ready to go, the ships are at the docks, the weather is perfect, etc. Real life is never like that. Add in the fact that moving this stuff is enormously expensive and time-consuming and is never actually practiced. To actually move a division from the U.S. to Turkey could easily cost hundreds of millions of dollars and take a month or more of time. Each way! Another issue is that the railroad network from Western Europe to Eastern Turkey is problematic at best. One of the reasons that American troops have been brought back from Europe to the U.S. is that following Gulf Storm they discovered that shipping troops from Germany to Iraq didn’t actually save all that much time compared to shipping them from America. Interesting.
I did receive several emails from various military and ex-military types, explaining about how it could have happened, pointing out this tank or that airplane or this intelligence should have been highlighted. These things were all true, but one thing I wanted to avoid was an overly technical ‘Tom Clancy’ or ‘Dale Brown’ style war. Carl is writing the story first person, and he would only see the operational and strategic levels. He just wouldn’t be getting into the nitty-gritty like some other writers would.