Word: frontality
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...strike the allied forces because his air force is in hiding or in exile, his insignificant navy is bottled up, and his Scud missiles are too inaccurate to pose much threat to military targets. He can only hope that the allied troops will come to him in a frontal assault on his fixed positions...
...probable U.S. and allied attack strategy: U.S. and Arab troops may stage frontal assaults to keep Iraqi troops pinned down and launch a secondary thrust along the Persian Gulf coast. But the main assault could be a left hook: an attack around the western tip of Kuwait into Iraq proper, looping back to cut off the dug-in troops. As for tactics, the primary way to breach the fortifications would be simply to try to blast a way through with aerial bombs. If that does not work, combat engineers would use "line charges" -- bombs thrown out on cables to form...
Once the bombing had softened up the Iraqi positions, U.S. ground forces could go into action. Part of the force might swing to the west to cut off Iraqi forces in southern Iraq while other units mounted a frontal attack to smash through enemy defenses in Kuwait. Though military tradition holds that an attacking force must have a 3-to-1 superiority in numbers to be confident of victory, U.S. troops have good reasons for discounting those odds in a battle against Iraq. Among them...
Fight a defensive war. The aim would be to survive the American aerial blitz that would open the war and then force or lure the U.S. and its allies into a series of grinding, fearsomely bloody frontal assaults on heavily dug-in Iraqi positions -- a recrudescence, 75-odd years later, of World War I-style trench warfare. That would be accompanied by some of the biggest tank battles ever fought, which would also be destructive and bloody. The allies might suffer huge losses so quickly that they would speedily sue for peace or perhaps accede to a panicky U.N. call...
...enemy headquarters and troops in the field, infrared devices supposed to turn night into day for soldiers drawing a bead on hostile troops and armor. The Iraqi forces in Kuwait would rely on an extensive network of minefields, earth berms, razor wire and trenches designed to make an enemy frontal assault as fruitlessly bloody as the British Somme offensive...