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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: AK2004 who wrote (36454)	8/9/2002 1:29:33 AM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi albert kovalyov; Re the subject of water and soldiers... Another example of armies using fairly shallow water barriers is from the Iran Iraq war: The Longest War The Iran-Iraq Military Conflict Dilip Hiro, 1991 (page 180) What favoured Baghdad's planners was the fact that about 12 miles south-east of Basra the international frontier swerves sharply from the fluvial border of the Shatt al Arab, and takes a straight north-south direction. Between the waterway and the land border, the Iraqis had by April 1981 dug a trench three yards deep, 18 miles long and three quarters of a mile wide. By connecting it with the Shatt Al Arab through a wide channel, called the Jasim Canal, and three narrow ones, and using giant pumps, they filled it with water. This moat proved to be an effective barrier to the invading Iranians in their 1982 offensive, providing the Iraqis with killing fields to its east, north and south. By January 1983 the Iraqis had extended the water barrier by creating a trapezium shaped reservoir, named Fish Lake, that was 6 miles long at its south-eastern end. And by August 1984 they had constructed two channels from the reservoir: one narrow outlet to the south-east towards Khorramshahr, and the other, 1.2 miles wide, heading north. It was a stupendous, expensive task -- requiring the excavation of 400 million cubic metres of heavy clay at the cost of $1000 million -- but well worth it, for the Iraqis used the canals as well as the lake to place their heavy weapons behind them. -- Carl P.S. Any ground pounder who takes a hard look at open water notices several things about it. (1) It has no places to dig into. (2) It has nothing to hide behind. (3) It has no solid stuff to support your rifle or other weapons so that you can aim them carefully. (4) It gets into your equipment and harms or even destroys it. (5) In many places in the world it's so cold that it kills you quickly from hypothermia. (6) To move through it requires that you use boats, which prevent dispersion and makes your soldiers into targets. (7) It tends to make you drown quickly from even minor wounds. (8) It's completely uninhabited so there isn't anything to rape or pillage, or even a chair to sit in. All in all, water makes a great barrier. This has been true throughout history and it remains true even today. This is why countries that are water powers (like the US) have great ease in defending islands (like Taiwan or Britain), and peninsulas (like South Korea or Gallipoli) as opposed to regions with larger land boundaries.