Christopher Bellamy: Iraqis' only hope is the urban jungle

The battle for Baghdad has not yet properly begun. There are still not enough troops in place for a serious assault on the Iraqi capital. We are seeing the prelude to the Battle of Baghdad. The objective of the US attacks on the Republican Guard roughly south of the great city is discrete: to trap them, isolate them from the metropolis and stop them withdrawing into it.

US spokesmen said it was already impossible for the three Republican Guard divisions, reported as Medina, Hammurabi and Nebuchadnezzar, to move back into the urban jungle because of overwhelming Allied air power. Oh yes they can. Even if these relatively well-disciplined, equipped and manned divisions have to leave their heavy weapons behind, they can withdraw into Baghdad to fight as infantry if ordered to. If I were an Iraqi general trained at the British Staff College, or any other, that is what I would do.

Why? Because my tanks, self-propelled and towed guns, infantry fighting vehicles and armoured personnel carriers are a magnet for US firepower. And the fire pouring down on my men is unsustainable.

Had I trained in Moscow, I would know that even better. German veterans of the eastern front in the Second World War described a Soviet artillery barrage as being "a thousand express trains rushing toward you". Ted Briggs, one of the three British sailors to survive the sinking of HMS Hood by the Bismarck in 1941, described the huge one-tonne projectiles fired by the German battleship as white-hot circles ringed in red flame – heading for you. Of the 100 or so prisoners taken in the cellars of the Berlin Air Ministry in 1945, after Soviet artillery attack, the official reports say, "17 had gone mad". We saw similar pictures of people shocked into madness after the battle of Grozny, half a century later.

What the combatants went through in the Second World War is nothing to what those Iraqi troops, officers and frontline generals are going through now. American firepower is awesome and infinitely more accurate than Second World War gunnery and bombing.

The most terrifying weapon faced by the Germans on the eastern front was the Katyusha multiple rocket launcher, codenamed a "Guards Mortar". Its inaccuracy formed part of its terror. But the multiple-launch rocket system used by the US and British armies, firing nine-inch calibre rockets up to 25 miles and excoriating a 250-square-metre area of land – is different by an order of magnitude. And then there is the air power. The sound of B-52 bombs falling can be heard 40 miles away. Imagine being right underneath. General George S Patton observed of his terrible profession: "Battles are won frightening the enemy. Fear is instilled by killing and wounding him."

Fire from the rear is three times as deadly as fire from the front. But to get fire behind the enemy, you have to fix him by fire, and then move rapidly round the flank. The raw basics of war are being applied with unprecedented efficiency.

The Iraqis always knew they would lose any symmetrical battle. The Vietnamese had the world's first proper military academy, in the 14th century. They taught the combination of "regular" and "irregular" warfare; of "direct" and "indirect", of "symmetric" and "asymmetric". The Vietnam War was not just won by the Vietcong. It was the North Vietnamese Army which drove into Saigon in 1975 in smart military uniforms and tanks. The Iraqis are playing the same cards in a mirror-image hand.

Christopher Bellamy is professor of military science and doctrine at Cranfield University