by NY Post columnist Ralph Peters. He has some interesting observations about Saddam's strategy verses ours.

Far from technically incompetent, Saddam's plan was right out of Clausewitz. Its models were the lessons of the Russian defeat of Napoleon in 1812 and the Soviet victory over the Germans in the Second World War.



The principles were: Delay your enemy, attrit his forces, trade space for time, harass his supply lines and husband your best forces for a mighty counterattack. Wait until the attacker has advanced so far into your country that he reaches a "culminating point" at which he has lost his momentum and his supply lines are overextended. Then strike.

Saddam didn't so much plan the defense of Baghdad as he tried to refight the defense of Moscow.

His plan was a textbook model for a modern war to be fought by a nation in arms, containing the wisdom of historical experience. Had Saddam faced any other military in the world, he would have extracted a far higher price - and might even have won in a war of attrition.

But the campaign the U.S. military fought cast off the rules of the modern era. We fought the first post-modern war. In the final grudge match between Clausewitz and GI Joe, it was a shutout. And no other military on earth could have done it.

What remains remarkable is how little the Iraqis - and the Russian advisers who helped plan their defense - grasped the profound changes in our military and the American way of war. They clearly had no sense of the battlefield awareness, speed, precision and tactical ferocity of America's 21st century forces.



What about the next war? Military histrians and strategists will study how the US conducted their part of the war and try to devise tactics to stop it. To prevent that from happening, our military leaders will have to keep evolving new strategies to keep our opponents off balance. "Fighting the last war" is an old problem that we can no longer afford.