Aldarion
Neoreactionary Monarchist
@Bear Ribs @Aldarion
Look up the order of battle for Iran.
It literally has them using M60s, M48s, Chieftains, M113s....
I'm aware, that's why I took exception to his "They were a light-infantry militia with no tanks, aircraft, artillery..." comment and am trying to get him to acknowledge the facts about just how much metal they had.
Again, you guys are ignoring the difference between ORBAT and actual combat strength.
For example, if you take German Luftwaffe in 2010s (or even today) on its ORBAT, it had significant strength of Eurofighter Typhoons.
But in 2018., only four out of 128 Typhoons were combat-ready or even operational.
That is the situation Iranian military was. It had significant strength on paper, but much of its heavy hardware was not actually usable even at the beginning of the war. And because it was completely unable to replace the combat losses, or even provide enough spare parts, its inventory of heavy weapons (tanks, artillery, aircraft) was steadily depleted throughout the conflict. And as I pointed out, Iranian losses in the opening stages of conflict were massive. Not much equipment was left operational after the first couple of years.
Capisci?
And both sides in that war were not particularly competent - considering their tactics, they would have had trouble against the Imperial German Army. Iraqis used their tanks as mobile artillery pillboxes, not that different from British usage of Mark Is in World War I. Worse, in fact, because tanks advanced a good distance behind the infantry, and would frequently dig in, wait for artillery to saturate the general area in front of them, and then resume the snail-pace advance. This behavior might have been excusable against an enemy with massive supply of ATGMs, but against Iran? Yeah, no. Keep in mind, these were 1980s., and Iran did not have many ATGMs to begin with.
And even their artillery was incompetent, incapable of doing anything beyond area saturation. Pint fire, counterbattery fire, on-call fire, switching fire, even the 1918.-standard creeping barrage, were all well beyond their technical and C&C capabilities. This was equally true for Iraq and Iran.
EDIT: As to numbers:
Iraq had ~2600 MBTs in 1979., 2750 in 1980., and 7000 in 1988.
Iran had 1700 MBTs in 1979., <1000 in 1980.
But as I said, issue with Iran was that most of it was not actually combat-ready.
Many, and as the war dragged on this became clear majority, of Iranian tanks were inoperable due to lack of spare parts. It also had APCs, but no more than 950 were operational in 1985. Likewise, by 1981., less than one-third of its air force was operational, and by 1985., no more than one-fifth of its aircraft were in a flyable state.
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