excerpts from MSNBC internet news at site: http://www.msnbc.com/news/890280.asp?0bl=-0
staff researcher Robert Thomason contributed to this report
The Washington Post Company
Unfolding battle holds key to war
March 25, 2003
Until now, U.S. forces have fought regular Iraqi units and militias in small-unit skirmishes. Now they will face the Iraqi army's best troops for the first time, not in the wide-open desert but in the heavily populated and vegetated Euphrates Valley. Perhaps 40,000 troops and aircrews all told from both sides are poised to clash just a few miles west of the ancient city of Babylon. If Iraq chooses to use chemical weapons during this war, analysts think it will be in this battle.
Early indications are that it will be a tough battle. In the first engagement between U.S. Army and the Medina Division, before dawn Monday, about 35 Apache attack helicopters flew over part of the division, which is spread out in wooded and built-up areas east of the town of Karbala, about 50 miles southwest of Baghdad.
Indications are that Iraqis now are applying hard lessons learned during the Gulf War and then, by the Yugoslav military, during the 1999 Kosovo air campaign. The tanks and heavy weapons of the Medina Division aren't arrayed for battle, in tight formations that would make them easy targets, but instead were dispersed under trees and in the farming villages of the Euphrates River valley, defense officials said.
That setup makes them difficult to hit with punishing B-52 carpet bombings, Instead, Air Force A-10's and F-16's and Navy F/A-18's are flying smaller "tank-plinking" strikes, which are riskier for pilots. While those retail-style raids do destroy some armored vehicles, they don't have the effect that heavy bombers do of disrupting other essentials of military operations, such as resupply and communications.