Word: sand
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Iraqi units are entrenched in their now traditional triangular forts, formed of packed sand, with an infantry company equipped with heavy machine guns holding each corner. Soldiers are protected by portable concrete shelters or dugouts of sheet metal and sand. Tanks are hull deep in the ground and bolstered with sandbags. Artillery pieces are deployed at the apex of each ! triangle, pre-aimed at "killing zones" created by flaming trenches and minefields. Defensive deployments like these are immobile; the officers learned in their war with Iran to hunker down, absorb attacks and fire back with artillery, often loaded with chemical...
...broad flanking movement far to the west, for example, possibly accompanied by a Marine amphibious landing in Kuwait and multiple feints at the fortified front as well. Because the Iraqis have no reconnaissance planes in the air and no battlefield intelligence aside from what they can see over their sand walls, they will not know which thrust is the main one. They are also blinded by a shortage of night-fighting equipment and their inability to communicate with each other under electronic jamming...
...what scale -- and why he had ever gone on the attack at all. The Iraqi army fights most effectively from behind barbed wire, minefields and trenches like those it has dug in Kuwait. Why pull any troops and tanks out of the bunkers and holes in the sand, in which they had been fairly effectively hiding from air attack, and expose them to the full fury of allied air and artillery bombardment...
...Iraq is trying to throw sand into the gears of the allies' military preparations. Saddam might hope to delay or disrupt a possible allied flanking attack around the western tip of Kuwait by forcing American, British or Arab troops that have been moving west to shift back to the east. Perhaps he also tried to take some of the bombing pressure off his supply lines and rear installations by forcing the U.S. to divert planes into close support of ground forces along the border...
...bolted together at the edge of a runway, that serve as a photo intelligence center. Specialists wearing white gloves bend over light tables and peer through loupes to examine miles of black-and-white film as it rolls by. Most of the film is a dead gray wash -- desert sand -- but occasionally a white speck or a cluster of dark dots appears...