We’ve already talked about the Battle of 73 Easting, so let’s talk about the battle that followed close on it’s heels, the Battle of Medina Ridge, the 32nd anniversary of which just passed, and which some regard as the largest tank battle of Desert Storm.
Following 73 Easting and the Battle of Norfolk, The Adnan Republican Guard division of motorized infantry launched an artillery spoiling attack against the U.S. First Armored to slow their advance, only to be slaughtered by MLRS cluster bombs, Apaches and A-10s.
This is simultaneous with the destruction of loot-laden Iraqi vehicles on the Highway of Death and the burning of Kuwaiti oil fields.
Despite the Iraqis believing that the rugged terrain south of the Euphrates valley is too difficult for an armored division to negotiate, the 24th Infantry Division reached their objective, securing Highway 8 east of where the 101st had done so a couple of days earlier. They blockade the highway, destroying over 100 vehicles retreating westwards with tank and TOE fire. Bedouin nomads watching from atop a nearby ridgeline politely applaud as tank rounds hit their targets.
The Medina Division of the Iraqi Republican Guard is the last organized combat force standing against the U.S. and its allies.
While the Iraqis have entrenched behind a small hill the Americans must crest, they’ve made the mistake of being just out of range of their T-72s.
“For the next 40 minutes, the engaged elements of the First Armored Division simply sit there picking off Iraqi tanks and armored vehicles with impunity. The Iraqis desperately call in artillery support, but the rounds fall behind the front line of Abrams tanks.”
“The 1st and 25th Field Artillery Regiments respond. Using artillery acquisition radars, the U.S. artillery is able to detect the firing of an Iraqi artillery piece, pinpoint its exact position, and return counter artillery fire on it before the Iraqi round has even landed. Within just a few minutes, two entire artillery battalions of the Medina division have been wiped out.”
“40 minutes after the battle began, the Medina’s right flank has been completely destroyed, and the right flank of the American force is just beginning to smash into the Medina’s left. In this sector, many Iraqi tanks are pointing southwest. The nearest tanks are destroyed before they can even rotate their turrets towards the Americans. Those that do fire back find that they are again outranged.”
Apaches and A-10s join in here as well.
“The battle would become known as The Battle of Medina Ridge. It lasts just two hours during which 186 Iraqi tanks and 172 armored vehicles are destroyed. Four American Abrams tanks are lost.”
I’m skipping over some secondary action and friendly fire incidents, but the Iraqis were complete routed and Americans took minimal casualties.
If more modern American and NATO tanks using combined arms operations took on even more antiquated Soviet tanks in Ukraine, the result is likely to be similar.
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5 Responses to “Remembering the Battle of Medina Ridge”
“If more modern American and NATO tanks using combined arms operations took on even more antiquated Soviet tanks in Ukraine, the result is likely to be similar.”
Only if the US and NATO troops are as well trained and led as those that fought at Medina ridge. The Army of the early 1990s had an advantage today’s Army lacks. The left completely ignored the Army after the Vietnam War and from 1980 to 1991 it was led by senior officers whose main goal was to turn it into the deadliest fighting force in the world.
Since 1993 the left has been focused on our military and has worked for 30 years to turn it into a model of equity. Fighting ability is well down on the modern US Armed Forces list of priorities. Pronouns are more important.
Fighting spirit, leadership and motivation counts. The Ukrainians demonstrated that in the first months of their war when scratch units turned back the Russian invaders from Kyiv.
I am not saying we would lose to the Russians, but I suspect victory would take a lot, lot longer than two hours.
Military proficiency and skill are perishable items. Don’t train? You won’t perform.
And, this is one of the hardest things to get across to the civilians and the politicians. The civilians see training casualties and expenses in peacetime, and they ask “Why are you killing our boys and wasting our money?”. Politicians look at training and operational expenses and say “Why aren’t you building ships with my name on them? Why aren’t you buying new weapons that get built in my district…?”
Army field training, Navy steaming time, and Air Force flight hours aren’t sexy things that get the public and the politicians all hot and bothered, but they’re the reason you win wars, especially the “come as you are” sort.
Case in point, although it may actually seem as though it would refute that. When the Army was doing things back in the 1980s, every divisional unit in the Army pretty much went to the field at least 30 days per quarter; you went to the NTC if you were stateside at least once every two years, as a part of a brigade-sized task force. Every brigade got that experience; it was the capstone effort for a two-year evolution. The NTC was more the “National Testing Center” instead of the “Training Center”.
Clinton came in, and after Bush the First Idiot started the so-called “peace dividend” bullsh*t, the Army basically stopped training and stayed in garrison most of the time. You were lucky if you got a couple of two-week exercises a year at home station, and when and if you got an NTC rotation, units were usually so short-handed in specialty troops that you’d see the same guys show up on every single rotation at the NTC from that post. I remember one guy from Fort Stewart I saw three times in the same year, because he kept getting transferred from brigade to brigade to fill empty slots. The NTC experience became a lot more focused on training individual skills and small-unit skills, leaving a lot of the higher-level stuff on the table while we tried to overcome the deficiencies that should have been trained, identified, and fixed at home station.
The contradictory thing is that all of us who were there at the NTC at the time of OIF were dead-certain that the 3ID outfits we’d seen at NTC, and which were then in Kuwait getting ready to invade Iraq were completely unprepared for war and were going to get their asses handed to them going up against even the Iraqi Boy Scouts. They were that bad; that apathetic in training. They wouldn’t even go through the numbers for us, in training at the NTC. It was our expectation that there was going to be a huge “Oh, f*ck…” moment for the US Army and the nation. I’m not joking about that; every O/C from my time there at the end of the ’90s and into the early ’00 years was morally and utterly certain of that fact. We all talked about it; I was emailing guys, concerned about the whole deal. I was sending my former soldiers who were in the 3ID units everything I could, in terms of training resources.
Came the day? 3ID actually did us all proud. All of us who’d been their O/C’s were watching them on the news and going “Where the f*ck was all that, at NTC? WTF?” I mean, we were glad, but it was like this huge slap in the face for all of our efforts with those guys.
I later went with my own unit to Kuwait, and wound up sitting on my ass in Kuwait massaging logistics for our brigade. Perils of being handed a sh*tty impossible job and then managing to actually do it, that was… But, I was still sitting there in those desert base camps when they brought 3ID south to go home, and I got to talk to some of those guys, and yes, I did ask them “WTF, man? Where was all that, while you were with us at the NTC?”
One of the guys I asked that of was one of the most apathetic attendees ever at the NTC, one of those guys I saw three times in the same year. His response? “Well, after you’ve been to the NTC a half-dozen times, it’s kinda boring and useless… Plus, none of us going there ever thought we’d be using any of that sh*t, so… When we got here and were sitting in the damn desert for six months, there wasn’t anything else to do but train, and then it looked like we were gonna go, so… Yeah. Sh*t got real, real quick…”
If you don’t train continuously and hard, then when you do have to fight, the whole thing takes on the aspect of one of those All-Star games they put together from a bunch of elderly retired players that haven’t been on the field for a decade or more…
You mentioned on a previous thread, so I’m curious: regarding Ukraine and the Russian “effort”, what subreddits & youtube channels do you frequent for updates and analysis?
I just keep up on the news, and I’m pretty eclectic where I go… Usually, I use reddit and twitter for hints and then follow up by digging deeper.
You have to ask the questions about “Where does this come from?” and evaluate it using the usual military intelligence rubric about intel, which is summarized pretty well, here:
Once you’ve done that, you can sort out the BS from the “likely to be true”, and of course, part of that has to come from experience. I can eyeball a unit and tell you within a couple of minutes if they’ve got their act together or not; that’s not something you can just impart to someone with a few minutes of reading or a class. You have to have actual experience, and you don’t get that by watching from the sidelines, sadly.
I make no warranties about the veracity of any of these sources, but that’s where I go when I’m in the mood to see what’s going on. Whoever is tracking where I go on the web for the FBI is probably convinced I’m either insane or a bot; I may be the only person out there who ever had simultaneous subscriptions going to Soldier of Fortune, Whole Earth Quarterly, Military Technology, and a bunch of other eclectic things. If my reading list ever got flagged anywhere, the poor bastard trying to make sense of it is likely still gibbering in a corner, somewhere…
“If more modern American and NATO tanks using combined arms operations took on even more antiquated Soviet tanks in Ukraine, the result is likely to be similar.”
No. Expect the woke American military to bathe itself in shame, and flee any battlefield in rout.
“If more modern American and NATO tanks using combined arms operations took on even more antiquated Soviet tanks in Ukraine, the result is likely to be similar.”
Only if the US and NATO troops are as well trained and led as those that fought at Medina ridge. The Army of the early 1990s had an advantage today’s Army lacks. The left completely ignored the Army after the Vietnam War and from 1980 to 1991 it was led by senior officers whose main goal was to turn it into the deadliest fighting force in the world.
Since 1993 the left has been focused on our military and has worked for 30 years to turn it into a model of equity. Fighting ability is well down on the modern US Armed Forces list of priorities. Pronouns are more important.
Fighting spirit, leadership and motivation counts. The Ukrainians demonstrated that in the first months of their war when scratch units turned back the Russian invaders from Kyiv.
I am not saying we would lose to the Russians, but I suspect victory would take a lot, lot longer than two hours.
Military proficiency and skill are perishable items. Don’t train? You won’t perform.
And, this is one of the hardest things to get across to the civilians and the politicians. The civilians see training casualties and expenses in peacetime, and they ask “Why are you killing our boys and wasting our money?”. Politicians look at training and operational expenses and say “Why aren’t you building ships with my name on them? Why aren’t you buying new weapons that get built in my district…?”
Army field training, Navy steaming time, and Air Force flight hours aren’t sexy things that get the public and the politicians all hot and bothered, but they’re the reason you win wars, especially the “come as you are” sort.
Case in point, although it may actually seem as though it would refute that. When the Army was doing things back in the 1980s, every divisional unit in the Army pretty much went to the field at least 30 days per quarter; you went to the NTC if you were stateside at least once every two years, as a part of a brigade-sized task force. Every brigade got that experience; it was the capstone effort for a two-year evolution. The NTC was more the “National Testing Center” instead of the “Training Center”.
Clinton came in, and after Bush the First Idiot started the so-called “peace dividend” bullsh*t, the Army basically stopped training and stayed in garrison most of the time. You were lucky if you got a couple of two-week exercises a year at home station, and when and if you got an NTC rotation, units were usually so short-handed in specialty troops that you’d see the same guys show up on every single rotation at the NTC from that post. I remember one guy from Fort Stewart I saw three times in the same year, because he kept getting transferred from brigade to brigade to fill empty slots. The NTC experience became a lot more focused on training individual skills and small-unit skills, leaving a lot of the higher-level stuff on the table while we tried to overcome the deficiencies that should have been trained, identified, and fixed at home station.
The contradictory thing is that all of us who were there at the NTC at the time of OIF were dead-certain that the 3ID outfits we’d seen at NTC, and which were then in Kuwait getting ready to invade Iraq were completely unprepared for war and were going to get their asses handed to them going up against even the Iraqi Boy Scouts. They were that bad; that apathetic in training. They wouldn’t even go through the numbers for us, in training at the NTC. It was our expectation that there was going to be a huge “Oh, f*ck…” moment for the US Army and the nation. I’m not joking about that; every O/C from my time there at the end of the ’90s and into the early ’00 years was morally and utterly certain of that fact. We all talked about it; I was emailing guys, concerned about the whole deal. I was sending my former soldiers who were in the 3ID units everything I could, in terms of training resources.
Came the day? 3ID actually did us all proud. All of us who’d been their O/C’s were watching them on the news and going “Where the f*ck was all that, at NTC? WTF?” I mean, we were glad, but it was like this huge slap in the face for all of our efforts with those guys.
I later went with my own unit to Kuwait, and wound up sitting on my ass in Kuwait massaging logistics for our brigade. Perils of being handed a sh*tty impossible job and then managing to actually do it, that was… But, I was still sitting there in those desert base camps when they brought 3ID south to go home, and I got to talk to some of those guys, and yes, I did ask them “WTF, man? Where was all that, while you were with us at the NTC?”
One of the guys I asked that of was one of the most apathetic attendees ever at the NTC, one of those guys I saw three times in the same year. His response? “Well, after you’ve been to the NTC a half-dozen times, it’s kinda boring and useless… Plus, none of us going there ever thought we’d be using any of that sh*t, so… When we got here and were sitting in the damn desert for six months, there wasn’t anything else to do but train, and then it looked like we were gonna go, so… Yeah. Sh*t got real, real quick…”
If you don’t train continuously and hard, then when you do have to fight, the whole thing takes on the aspect of one of those All-Star games they put together from a bunch of elderly retired players that haven’t been on the field for a decade or more…
@Kirk
You mentioned on a previous thread, so I’m curious: regarding Ukraine and the Russian “effort”, what subreddits & youtube channels do you frequent for updates and analysis?
I just keep up on the news, and I’m pretty eclectic where I go… Usually, I use reddit and twitter for hints and then follow up by digging deeper.
You have to ask the questions about “Where does this come from?” and evaluate it using the usual military intelligence rubric about intel, which is summarized pretty well, here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_source_and_information_reliability
Once you’ve done that, you can sort out the BS from the “likely to be true”, and of course, part of that has to come from experience. I can eyeball a unit and tell you within a couple of minutes if they’ve got their act together or not; that’s not something you can just impart to someone with a few minutes of reading or a class. You have to have actual experience, and you don’t get that by watching from the sidelines, sadly.
Places I go:
https://www.reddit.com/r/UkraineWarVideoReport/new/
Whole bunch of other websites too lengthy to get into, as well. That’s the best I’ve seen for video footage, so far.
On Twitter:
@pmakela1
@TrentTelenko
@kamilkazani
@wartranslated
@TheDeadDistrict
@UAWeapons
@VDV_Textbooks
@CorporalFrisk
@oryxspioenkop
@Osinttechnical
@DefMon3
@bayraktar_1love
@OSINTua
@Caucasuswar
@noclador
@PeterZeihan
@Tendar
@CAT_UXO
@historicfirearm
@ChrisO_wiki
@osint_east
@ArmyRecognition
I make no warranties about the veracity of any of these sources, but that’s where I go when I’m in the mood to see what’s going on. Whoever is tracking where I go on the web for the FBI is probably convinced I’m either insane or a bot; I may be the only person out there who ever had simultaneous subscriptions going to Soldier of Fortune, Whole Earth Quarterly, Military Technology, and a bunch of other eclectic things. If my reading list ever got flagged anywhere, the poor bastard trying to make sense of it is likely still gibbering in a corner, somewhere…
“If more modern American and NATO tanks using combined arms operations took on even more antiquated Soviet tanks in Ukraine, the result is likely to be similar.”
No. Expect the woke American military to bathe itself in shame, and flee any battlefield in rout.