ANTHOLOGY AND ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY                                       97


Col. Richard Barry, chief of the reconnaissance and surveillance teams, strode
into Boomer's office and told his boss: "Those bastards have been shooting at
me--they know where I am and they can't hit me.    I don't think they're all that
great.
   With those reports, American field commanders began to suspect serious
shortcomings in the Iraqi military.  "As we began to accumulate evidence during
those later weeks, we all began to sense certainly they were not up to strength,"
Boomer said.    "But we weren't going to say anything about it."
   Just as the U.S. intelligence agencies reported the massive buildup of Iraqi
troops along the Kuwaiti border in late July but failed to predict Saddam
Hussein's intent to invade the oil-rich emirate, these same institutions were
unable to gauge the Iraqi soldiers' lack of commitment to fight a war for a cause
they did not support. While captured maps and overlays reveal that intelligence
agencies were extremely precise in their assessments of which Iraqi military
units were deployed in the battlefield and where they were located, American
intelligence badly misjudged the state of affairs within those units.
   "Intelligence concentrated on things, people, equipment, numbers," said Lt.
Col. Keith L. Holcomb, commander of a Marine team that penetrated into Iraqi
territory to gather first-hand intelligence in the days before the ground war
began.  "War is a contest of wills.   It's an intangible. They (the Iraqis) didn't
have the will."
   While many commanders now concede that the Iraqi military was only a
fraction of the powerhouse it had been portrayed to be, they contend that the
early assessments contributed significantly to a battle plan that allowed allied
troops to overwhelm the Iraqi       military with relatively small numbers of
casualties on the allied side.
   "The intelligence guys are paid to give you the worst case, within limits,"
said Boomer.    "I think to some degree they did that, and that wasn't a failing
on their part.  In fact, if anything, it helped us."
   Battlefield assessments and captured sand models showing in elaborate detail
some Iraqi defensive poSitions indicate that the Iraqis had devised professional,
well-planned    defenses, in many     cases not dissimilar to what  American
commanders said they would have established in the same areas.
   Many defensive bunker complexes were masterfully designed; the main
ammunition and supply depot for the Iraq army corps assigned to defend central
Kuwait   apparently  went   undetected   by  allied intelligence and remained
well-stocked and intact until Marine forces overran it.
   Vast stocks of ammunition--most of it produced in Jordan--were found with
combat units throughout the battlefield, indicating that the Iraqis were equipped
to fight far longer than they did.    American forces also found among these
stocks ammunition from the Soviet Union, China, Germany and the United
States.