Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog

(Note: This is partially recycled from a previous post in honor of the 30th anniversary of the battle, but the video is new.)

Thirty years ago, on February 26, 1991, units of the American Second Armored Cavalry Regiment engaged the armor of the Iraqi Republican Guard Tawakalna Division in the Battle of 73 Easting.

The furious action lasted twenty-three minutes. The troop stopped when there was nothing left to shoot. Sporadic contact ranged from nuisance machine gun fire to one company-sized counterattack of T-72s and BMP armored personnel carriers. Tanks and Bradleys destroyed enemy vehicles at long range from the dominating position on the ridge. Three Bradleys from first platoon, led by Lieutenant Michael Petschek, encountered and destroyed four T-72s as they moved north to reestablish physical contact with G Troop. Medics treated and evacuated enemy wounded. Crews cross-leveled ammunition. Mortars suppressed enemy infantry further to the east as our fire support officer, Lieutenant Dan Davis, called in devastating artillery strikes on enemy logistical bases. Scouts and a team under the control of First Sergeant Bill Virrill cleared bunkers using grenades and satchel charges, and then led a much-needed resupply convoy through minefields to our rear. A psychological operations team broadcasted surrender appeals forward of the troop and the troop took the first of hundreds of prisoners including the brigade commander. Soldiers segregated, searched, and secured prisoners through the night. Many prisoners cried because they had not expected such humane treatment; their officers had told them that we would execute them. The prisoners were incredulous when our soldiers returned their wallets without taking any of the money that they had looted from Kuwait City. Just after 2200, 1ID conducted a forward passage of lines in Third Squadron’s area of operation to our south.

The morning after the battle, soldiers were exhausted. Many of the approximately fifty T-72s, twenty-five armored personnel carriers, forty trucks and numerous other vehicles that the troop destroyed were still smoldering. Our troop had taken no casualties.

Other sources say Americans suffered a small number of casualties, but it’s unclear whether these occurred during the Battle of 73 Easting itself, or immediately following it but before the larger engagement of the Battle of Norfolk.

Here’s a video on the battle:

In addition to being an overwhelming victory, and part of the larger overwhelming victory of Desert Storm, the Battle of 73 Easting was important for several other reasons.

For one thing, it was the largest tank battle between American- and Soviet-constructed armor since Israeli M-60 Patton tanks faced off against Egyptian T-62s in Sinai campaign of the Yom Kippur War in 1973. All throughout the 70s and early 1980s, various media outlets talked about how much better Soviet military equipment was than American equipment. (I remember a 60 Minutes episode that talked about Soviet equipment being better “all across the board.”) And Soviet equipment was better—on paper, with thicker armor, higher top speeds, etc. And then 73 Easting happened, and M1A1s wiped the floor with T-72s. A lot of that was American troops being much better trained and led than Iraqi troops. But the Republican Guard was the best the Iraq army had, and on paper the T-72 was a match for the M1A1s. In actual combat, the T-72s started blowing up before they realized the Americans were engaging (and destroying) Iraqi armor at the extreme range of the American computerized fire control systems. Soviet armor still used reticules reticles, where the gunner had to manually calculate distance and windage to put shots on target.

In Vietnam, early computerized combat technology was clunky and unreliable. By the time of Desert Storm, the furious onrush of Moore’s Law had rendered technology smaller, more compact, more reliable, and more user-friendly. By pursuing what Jerry Pournelle called the strategy of technology, the United States was producing weapons that were qualitatively superior to those of its communist foes. That technological gap (especially in the form of SDI) was one of the drivers for the end of the Cold War, and it was on full display in Desert Storm. The Soviet Union itself would dissolve later the same year.

The Battle of 73 Easting was also important because it become the most accurately simulated battle ever:

The Battle of 73 Easting has become the single most accurately recorded combat engagement in human history. Army historians and simulation modelers thoroughly interviewed the American participants, and paced the battlefield meter by meter. They came up with a fully interactive, network-capable digital replica of the events at 73 Easting, right down to the last TOW missile and .50-caliber pockmark. Military historians and armchair strategists can now fly over the virtual battlefield in the “stealth vehicle,” the so-called “SIMNET flying carpet,” viewing the 3-D virtual landscape from any angle during any moment of the battle. They can even change the parameters – give the Iraqis infrared targeting scopes, for instance, which they lacked at the time, and which made them sitting ducks for high-tech American M1s charging out of blowing sand. The whole triumphal blitzkrieg can be pondered over repeatedly (gloated over even), in perfect scratch-free digital fidelity. It’s the spirit of Southwest Asia in a digital nutshell. In terms of American military morale, it’s like a ’90s CD remix of some ’60s oldie, rescued from warping vinyl and remade closer to the heart’s desire.

Like Agincourt or Amiens, the Battle of 73 Easting heralded the arrival of a new type of technology to the battlefield, one that every army in the world would henceforth need to take into account.