Fire Trenches Offer Insight into Iraqi Defense Strategies
Mar 03, 2003
Summary
Various news sources have reported that Iraqi military troops are digging a series of large trenches around Baghdad. Although it initially appeared that these trenches were merely designed to serve as defensive positions, new information reveals that the excavations are meant to be filled with crude oil and ignited. This sheds some light on the Iraqi defense plan and the difficulty that coalition forces may face in attempts to capture Baghdad.
Analysis
Wire media recently have reported that Iraqi troops are digging a series of trenches around Baghdad. Some news reports hypothesized that these trenches were intended as fighting emplacements and defensive positions, as used in World War I. However, more recent information shows that Iraqi troops are filling those trenches with oil and setting them ablaze to test how long they would burn and which types of oil would produce the thickest smoke -- raising certain questions about Iraqi defense strategy.
These types of trenches, commonly called "fire trenches," offer several defensive advantages. First, the trenches -- which essentially are large moats filled with burning oil -- create physical barriers that are hard for attacking forces to breach, whether dismounted or attempting to cross in armored vehicles. In addition to the danger of burning that enemy forces face, the smoke offers another defensive advantage: Not only does it offer concealment, but burning crude generates paraffin-laden vapors. These burning particles effectively block the laser "painting" devices that the U.S. military uses to designate targets onto which striking aircraft must lock. Weapons systems such as the U.S. Air Force's JDAM (joint direct attack munition), which relies on a laser designator to be effective, would be rendered useless. The hot, thick smoke from burning firepits also could block FLIR (forward -looking infrared) imaging systems. FLIR relies on a heat signature in order to distinguish objects. Amid the heat and dark, oil smoke, this kind of imagery would be useless -- as would regular night vision devices, which only magnify ambient light.
Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi military have made use of fire trenches before. In addition to setting Kuwaiti oil fields ablaze during their 1991 retreat, Iraqi troops also used fire trenches in concert with mine fields and other obstacles. The defenses and mine fields were crisscrossed with a series of fire trenches -- each measuring about one kilometer long and made up of 10 100-meter sections. Three barrels of thickened fuel (also known as phougas) were placed in each section, and the sections then were filled with burning oil. The phougas was detonated electrically to start the oil burning, and the barrels were set off by wires running back to the main Iraqi trenches. The entire fuel distribution system was underground. From a central valve in a bunker, a network of pipes connected to another set of pipes running behind each of the trenches which supplied more oil for the fires.
If not for the services of an Iraqi informant during the 1991 Gulf War, coalition forces would have faced disaster in attempts to breach those fire pits. However, Egyptian rangers and U.S. Special Forces teams, working together, managed to keep the trenches from being ignited.
Significantly, Hussein may be attempting to use -- and refine -- combat deception techniques employed by Serbian forces during the Kosovo war. Once U.S. troops were on the ground in that conflict, officials learned that the military air campaign was not nearly as successful as they had believed. Serb troops either were able to deceive coalition aircraft into attacking the wrong targets or to mask targets altogether. Their tactics included setting fires around targets to disrupt laser-aiming systems and bouncing radar off of farm machinery to mask the origin of radar signals. Even methods as simple as setting a microwave oven out in the open, attaching it to a power source and pointing it in the flight path of air sorties proved effective: The oven provided enough heat and radiation to deceive sensors.
Adding to the significance of the Balkan lessons, U.S. intelligence officials have confirmed that Iraq was involved in an exchange program of sorts with the government and military forces of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic at that time. It would make sense that Hussein was able to pick up some techniques for fooling allied aircraft; fire trenches conceivably could be an extension of these combat deception techniques.
These fire trenches conceivably could be used as a line of defense from Baghdad, but it is impossible to say with certainty that this is Iraq's strategy. Media reports mention trenches only to the north of Baghdad, but that does not necessarily mean that they are not being dug in other areas as well.
It also is possible that these trenches are not intended so much to defend Baghdad against invasion as they are to cover an Iraqi retreat from the capital into the north-central region of the country. It is in this region that Hussein's hometown of Tikrit is located -- a town that a Republican Guard division has been withdrawn from Mosul to protect. If the fire trenches are dug only to the north of Baghdad, this could mean that Hussein is planning to use them to cover a retreat into that region, where his forces might regroup and prepare for a counter-attack.
If the trenches being dug completely encircle Baghdad, coalition forces likely must brave a wall of smoke to seize the capital. If, on the other hand, the fire trenches remain only on the northern edge of the city, it could mean that Baghdad may not be the scene of Hussein's last stand. U.S. military leaders appear to believe without question that the fall of Baghdad will signal the end of the war -- when in fact it could merely herald a shift from an invasionary assault to guerilla warfare with the remnants of Hussein's loyalist troops. |
