Word: sanding
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...land on which Scheme Z will be built has for many years served as a trasportation corridor. Most of the land is undeveloped, cluttered with sand pits and railroad tracks...
...theory. And to that end Saddam and his military commanders have applied the experience they gained in their eight years of defensive battles against massed Iranian troops. Their highly skilled combat engineers have turned the Kuwaiti and Iraqi borders with Saudi Arabia into a Maginot Line in the sand. In an area about the size of West Virginia the Iraqis have poured 540,000 of their million-man army and 4,000 of their 6,000 tanks, along with thousands of other armored vehicles and artillery pieces...
These forces are deeply dug in behind layers of defensive barriers 40 miles wide. Bulldozers have piled sand walls up to 40 ft. high. Behind them is a network of ditches, some rigged with pipes to deliver oil that will be set on fire, and concrete tank traps. Behind those are miles of razor wire and at least 500,000 mines...
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...