Battleplan 01. Blitzkrieg (10 of 19)

Battleplan

In contrast, in March 2003, Tommy Franks never intended to achieve numerical superiority on the ground.
Ten years earlier in Operation Desert Storm, the Allies had fielded 750,000 men and over 2,000 tanks.
As March 2003 began, the Coalition had barely 120,000 men against the theoretical lraqi strength of 375,000 and barely 500 tanks against 2,000.
But Franks had learned a vital lesson from Operation Desert Storm.
When the Allied attack in 1991halted after liberating Kuwait and left Saddam still in power in lraq, many commentators suggested that it was a political decision.
Others disagree, blaming one of the inherent weak spots in the Blitzkrieg battleplan - logistics.

The reason that the Coalition attack stopped was quite simply logistics, that the tanks had run out of fuel and the air forces had run out of precision-guided munitions.
Whether the decision to stop during Desert Storm was due to politics or logistics, or both, an important lesson in armoured warfare was learned by the US battleplanners.
Modern main battle tanks, like the M1and the Challenger, have such a voracious appetite for fuel that you can't use that many of them and still move quickly.
The old marriage of armour and operational mobility that we saw during World War Two has ended and we now have to make trade-offs between combat power, the ability to fight, and operational mobility, the ability to move large distances overland.
To get around the logistic problem, Franks' version of the Blitzkrieg battleplan was based deliberately on using a far smaller force than in Desert Storm, but much more swiftly and aggressively.
Yet the press and military pundits not only expressed concern that the number of troops deployed for lraqi Freedom was much smaller than in Desert Storm, but that the weapons available, apparently in fewer numbers, looked much the same.