In most wars, individual units in any army are never really highlighted (save for the “Big Red One” from World War II, the title of a somewhat successful Hollywood picture). Yet the Iraqi Republican Guard became better known, by both friends and foes, than perhaps any military element of this century.

The U.S. Defense Department called the Republican Guards “Iraq’s most capable and loyal force, and [they] had received the best training and equipment.” Composed of men recruited from Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit, these men expressed incredible devotion to their leader; in return, they received the best pay, food, and weapons.

Frank Chadwick writes, “The Iraqi Republican Guard was originally intended to provide President Saddam Hussein with a body of troops of unquestioning loyalty. As the principal means of presidential succession in Iraq has become coup and murder, these troops were more political than military. They originally consisted of three brigades recruited from Tikrit, Saddam’s hometown in northern Iraq.” The number of divisions was later expanded to eight; by the time of the outbreak of the war, they included the First Armored Division, known as the Hammurabi; the Second Armored Division (the Medina), the Third Mechanized Division (the Tawakalna), the Fourth Motorized Division (the Al Faw), the Fifth Motorized Division (the Baghdad), the Sixth Motorized Division (the Nebuchadnezzar), the Seventh Motorized Division (the Adnan), and the Eighth Division, known as the Special Forces Division.

The U.S. Defense Department reports, “At the end of the war with Iran, the Republican Guard consisted of eight divisions. Combined with its independent infantry and artillery brigades, the Guard comprised almost 20 percent of Iraqi ground forces. Most Republican Guard heavy divisions were equipped with Soviet T-72 main battle tanks, Soviet BMP armored personnel carriers, French GCT self-propelled howitzers and Austrian GHN-45 towed howitzers—all modern, state-of-the-art equipment.”

Yet how well trained, and experienced, were Guard fighters? In From the House of War, the BBC’s John Simpson wrote, “The Republican Guard, which journalists and politicians insisted on calling ‘elite,’ was increased by several divisions during the period of the crisis, largely by means of taking men from regular units and giving them red berets. Anyone who could march in step was considered eligible. The officers of the Republican Guard were usually better trained, but that generally meant that they too had to be taken from other units. The mass dilution meant that the Republican Guards’ standards, which in the war against Iran had been above average, were little different from those of the rest of the Iraqi army. . . . When the ground offensive came, the ‘elite’ Republican Guard showed little more inclination to fight than the regular army divisions and reservists.”

References:

Chadwick, Frank, The Desert Shield Fact Book (Bloomington, IL: Game Designers’ Workshop, 1991), 51;

Conduct of the Persian Gulf War: Final Report to Congress, Report by the Department of Defense, April 1992, 10;

Simpson, John, From the House of War, quoted in Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War, by John R. MacArthur (New York: Hill & Wang, 1992), 243.