Not Just Desert Storm and the Yom Kippur War: Why the Iran-Iraq War Should Inform US Military Thinking about Large-Scale Combat Operations

Harrison Morgan

Source Link

Across an eight-year war and a thousand-mile front, Iran and Iraq mobilized hundreds of thousands of troops, fought with thousands of tanks and artillery pieces, and flew hundreds of combat aircraft and helicopters—an archetypal crucible of large-scale combat that killed roughly half a million people and scarred cities on both sides. The war began in September 1980, when Baghdad abrogated the 1975 Algiers Agreement and invaded after months of border clashes, betting that Iran’s postrevolution turmoil would yield quick concessions. By 1987, Iraq fielded about 800,000 troops, more than 4,500 tanks, and over 500 fighters, while Iran mustered roughly 850,000 troops, about 1,000 tanks, and only dozens of serviceable fighters. The 1988 campaign—culminating in Iraq’s swift recapture of the al-Faw Peninsula with an assault force of roughly 100,000 and heavy armor—set the conditions for Tehran’s acceptance of a ceasefire under UN Security Council Resolution 598. Yet despite its scale, the war remains relatively underrepresented among studies of large-scale combat operations (LSCO), particularly when compared with the 1973 Yom Kippur War or 1991’s Operation Desert Storm. It should not be. This war demonstrated how internal political dynamics, external alignments, and wartime finance determine how states mobilize and employ forces, how they escalate, and how they assess and posture after the guns fall silent. Iraq’s leadership, backed by supportive foreign governments and ample foreign loans, built a quality-first force with foreign equipment, training, and advisers; Iran, short on credit but rich in people, mobilized through parallel revolutionary institutions that converted manpower into endurance. The same three forces also shape today’s wars: They help explain why Russia and Ukraine mobilize and escalate so differently, and they offer the right lens for thinking about the next large-scale war—whether in Europe or the Indo-Pacific.

Mobilization and Employment: How Politics and Credit Shape the Ways States Fight

A personalist autocrat who rose by purge, Saddam Hussein launched a war of choice in September 1980 and then managed it to project strength without losing domestic control. He avoided a hasty, society-wide call-up and staged mobilization—about 30,000 conscripts a year from an annual cohort of around 135,000 until 1985, then roughly 70,000 a year through the war’s end. Simultaneously, he financed modernization on credit. After Iranian strikes destroyed Iraq’s oil terminals at Mina al-Bakr and Khor al-Amaya, Iraqi oil revenue fell from around $26 billion in 1980 to $7 billion in 1983. However, Gulf monarchies and the Soviet Union filled Iraq’s wartime funding gap with roughly $110 billion in loans and supplier credits—nearly three-quarters of Iraq’s war financing—letting Baghdad buy at scale: T-72 tanks and BMP infantry fighting vehicles; MiG and Su strike fighters; a helicopter fleet that dwarfed Iran’s; and the training, spares, and advisers to keep them combat-ready. On the ground, Iraq fought mostly on the defensive for much of the war behind layered, combined-arms belts east of Basra—minefields, wire, berms, and water obstacles tied to radar-guided artillery, attack helicopters, and chemical fires that bled repeated Iranian assaults at Shalamcheh and across the Basra approaches. By 1988, the compounding effects of Iraq’s maturing force, its sustained credit-backed kit and training, and Iran’s mounting casualties and revenue strain flipped the ledger. In the Tawakalna offensive of 1988, Iraq retook the critical al-Faw Peninsula in thirty-six hours, shattered Iranian lodgments along the southern front, and recovered all Iraqi territory, setting the conditions for Tehran’s acceptance of a ceasefire. According to most scholarly estimates, Iran’s losses exceeded Iraq’s—often cited as approximately 500,000 Iranian dead versus 180,000 Iraqi dead, with total wounded well above one million—underscoring how Baghdad’s credit-enabled, quality-first approach paired with defense in depth could impose attrition until conditions favored decisive counteroffensives.