By David Anthony Denny
Washington File staff writer

Washington - The commander of the U.S. Army's V Corps credits American success in Iraq to "the extraordinary power of the combined arms team."

At a Pentagon briefing from Baghdad by way of a satellite broadcast May 7, Lieutenant General William Scott Wallace explained that by combined arms he meant "the ability to balance reconnaissance and fires and maneuver in the right balance and the right proportions." He called it "an unbeatable combination."

As for which of the armed services did the most, Wallace said, "[T]he U.S. military won the war. The Army, the Marines, the Air Force, our special operations forces, the Navy ... all played a vital and unique role, and without any one of those, we probably would have had the same outcome, but it may have taken us a little bit longer and it may have been a little bit more costly."

Asked why the Iraqis used no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) against U.S. and coalition forces, Wallace first said the question ought to be asked of the Iraqi commanders, but then offered two possibilities:

"One theory is that we moved so fast they couldn't get their hands on it to employ it. And secondly, I would like to believe our information operations campaign had an impact" on the Iraqi commanders who "might have the opportunity to pull the trigger, and they thought it not such a good idea." Wallace also pointed out, in support of the first possibility, that combat operations began just a few days after U.N. weapons inspectors had left Iraq, and speculated that the Iraqis had the WMD hidden so well to prevent the inspectors from finding it that they couldn't retrieve it in time to use it.

Wallace said the decisive point in the fighting came when 3rd Infantry Division forces attacked a point along the Euphrates River between al-Hillah and Karbala, while simultaneously the 7th Cavalry moved to a point just south of the Karbala Gap. At the same time, he said, he directed the 101st Air Assault Division to attack from near an-Najaf toward a-l-Hillah, and also directed the 82d Airborne Division to make a similar attack into as-Samawah. Further, two aviation squadrons of the 101st performed an armed reconnaissance on the western flank.

As those five attacks were completed, intelligence and aerial observation reported that the Iraqis were repositioning their forces, apparently because the Iraqi commanders had judged the attacks to be the U.S. main effort, Wallace said.

"And it was about 3:00, maybe 4:00 in the afternoon on a beautiful sunlit day, low wind, no restrictions to flight, and at that point the U.S. Air Force had a heyday against those repositioning Iraqi forces," he said.

The combination of those combat operations plus the fact of having created a forward logistical supply base, Wallace said, led directly to the capture of Baghdad's airport just three days later.

"So if you're looking for a decisive point in the fight, for me, that was the decisive point," Wallace said.

Asked about the trouble the 11th Aviation's Apache attack helicopters ran into against the Iraqi Medina Division on March 23, Wallace said that "both the location of our attack aviation assembly areas and the fact that we were moving out of those assembly areas in the attack was announced to the enemy's air defense personnel by an Iraqi observer" located in An Najaf and using a cellular telephone with a speed-dial feature. An after-action review with the pilots and commanders led to changes in the use of attack aviation, he said, and two nights later they successfully conducted a deep operation to just north of Karbala.

Currently, "Iraq's still a dangerous place," Wallace said, with residual regime elements and criminals let out of jail by Saddam Hussein. Questioned about security in Baghdad, he answered, "I'm not particularly concerned about security in Baghdad at all," other than occasional criminal elements.

Wallace also noted that the military had called for Baghdad's police force to return to work earlier this week, and some 4,000 police officer --- about 52 percent of the force --- reported for duty the next day. They are conducting joint patrols with the 18th Military Police Brigade and 4 and a half Army Military Police companies, he said. The police lack vehicles, he said, and making sure they get paid is a challenge, but he's confident the joint patrols will be a successful operation.

Apart from Baghdad, Wallace said a civil-military operations center opened in downtown Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's hometown, on May 6, "[s]o the people there are ... beginning to realize that the regime that they were closely associated with is no longer in control." Mosul selected an interim mayor May 6, he noted, and "great progress is being made in Kirkuk."

"And right now, today, this morning [May 7], I have no areas that I'm overly concerned about," Wallace said.