What American Generals Said When They Watched The British Take Basra In 36 Hours
26,000 British soldiers were given a city of 1.3 million people. They were told it was the easy job and privately asked if they could even do the math. There were 14,000 regular Iraqi soldiers, up to 3,000 Fedayeen, and an unknown number of Ba’ath militia. Inside all of that was Basra, Iraq’s second city. The city sat on wired oil pipelines that, if set on fire the way Kuwait’s had been in 1991, would burn for a year and cost the world economy tens of billions of dollars.
And you know what the British did in response? They took their helmets off. Wait, their helmets off in an active combat zone with men shooting at them. At the same time, United States Army force protection doctrine required every American soldier in Iraq to wear a Kevlar helmet and full body armor at all times, under penalty of disciplinary action.
The British walked into the second largest city in Iraq, fought their way through it in 36 hours, then put on red and green berets, and stood on street corners drinking from plastic water bottles like they were on holiday in Cyprus. One US Army colonel watched this on April 7th, 2003.
He stood there for a full minute, then he turned to the British officer next to him and asked one question, six words long. Those six words would end up in the most important American military doctrine document of the 21st century. The United States Marine Corps spent the next 10 years trying to figure out how the British had done it.
Most of them never did. The colonel’s question was, how the hell did they do that? By the end of this video, you’re going to know exactly what General Mattis said about the British that week, what Tommy Franks said, what the British paid for it in the four years that followed, and the name the locals quietly started calling the British soldiers on the corners.
The soft caps, the men with no helmets. Stay with me. Because this story does not end where you think it ends. The Americans handed the British Southern Iraq. 15,000 square kilometers, the size of Wales. Operation Telic at peak was 46,000 British personnel. The largest British overseas deployment since the Gulf War.
Of those, 26,000 were ground combat troops. Now, stop and think about that ratio. 26,000 soldiers, 1.3 million civilians, up to 17,000 enemy combatants. The American assumption was this was the easier sector, the piece of the war that was, in the words of one Pentagon briefer, supposed to take care of itself. Inside the British command tent in Kuwait on March 19th, a brigadier looked at the map and wrote down a question he was not going to ask out loud, whether the math actually worked. It did not.
Not on paper, not in any war college simulation. But, the British accepted the mission anyway because they had been doing one specific kind of soldiering for 50 years that nobody else in the coalition had been doing. The night before the invasion, Lieutenant Colonel Tim Collins of the 1st Battalion Royal Irish Regiment stood in front of his men in Kuwait.
He told his soldiers to be ferocious in battle, but generous in victory. He told them the Iraqi soldiers they were about to fight would not have woken that morning planning to die. The speech was transcribed by a journalist who happened to be there. A copy reached the White House. President Bush, by some accounts, had it pinned to the wall of the Oval Office.
2,000 miles away, an American general in Qatar read it and said one word out loud. The word was Christ. Then the war started. The first thing the British did was something the Americans did not believe was possible. The Al Faw Peninsula sits at the very tip of Iraq. Through it run the pipelines that carry roughly 80% of Iraqi oil exports.
In 1991, Saddam’s army set fire to 600 Kuwaiti oil wells on the way out of Kuwait. The fires burned for 9 months. The Pentagon’s nightmare on the night of March 20th was that Saddam would do it again. To his own country, to Al-Faw. The Royal Marines of 40 Commando and 42 Commando were given the peninsula.
The Special Boat Service was given the offshore oil platforms, Mina al-Bakr and Khor al-Amaya. Both were wired with explosives. 3 hours before the assault, a sandstorm hit. Visibility dropped near zero. The American aviation assets earmarked to support the British insertion pulled their helicopters off the line.
Standard doctrine, you do not fly in conditions like that. The British pilots of 845 and 847 Naval Air Squadron read the same weather report. They went up anyway. Sea Kings and Chinooks on instruments alone into a sandstorm at low altitude carrying Royal Marines in full chemical protection suits in heat above 90°.
The platforms were taken intact, not damaged, not partially seized. Taken intact with the demolition wiring still in place and the Iraqi engineers in their bunks. The 1991 disaster did not happen. American helicopters were on the ground. The British were in the air. The war was less than 12 hours old. The next thing did not go the way the British expected.
Umm Qasr is a small port town, deep water, the only one of its kind on Iraq’s short coastline. Every ton of humanitarian aid going to feed southern Iraq was coming through that port. Pre-war [music] estimates said it would fall in a few hours. It took 4 days. The people defending it were not the regular army.
They were Fedayeen Saddam. Paramilitaries in civilian clothes. They used the warehouses, the narrow streets, the dockside cranes, and the houses of civilians as ambush positions. They moved. [music] They reappeared. They blended. American news commentators began comparing Umm Qasr to Mogadishu. Wait, Mogadishu? The town that was supposed to fall in 3 hours on day one? Yeah.
That is how fast the framing changed. But, this is the moment the first Marine Expeditionary Force in the sector to the north started paying very close attention. Their commander, Lieutenant General James Conway, had access to British drone feeds. He could watch the Royal Marines clear the town in real time.
And what he was watching was not American doctrine. American doctrine would have been overwhelming firepower. Suppress, isolate, reduce, advance. Fast, decisive, and it tends to leave the town in pieces. The Royal Marines did the opposite. Patient, slow, two-man teams clearing room by room.
The kind of soldiering that takes longer, but leaves the building standing and the civilians alive. By the end of day four, Umm Qasr was secure. The first humanitarian aid ships docked within 96 hours. Conway later told a colleague that watching Umm Qasr was the first time he registered the British were running a different war. He was correct.
He just did not yet know how different. Now, before I tell you what Major General Robin Brims did next, hit subscribe if you are finding this useful. Because we are about to get into the operational decision that almost cost him his command, and ended up rewriting the American counterinsurgency manual 3 years later.
Brims commanded the first UK armored division. He was a career light infantry officer with service in Germany, Northern Ireland, and Bosnia. His division included the 7th Armoured Brigade, the Desert Rats, with direct lineage from Montgomery’s North Africa force. Brigadier Graham Binns was in command. There were 42 Challenger 2 main battle tanks and hundreds of warriors.
On March 24th, Brims reached the outskirts of Basra. The American command was expecting him to push hard and take the city. The supply lines for the American advance on Baghdad were being chewed up by Fedayeen attacks running from An Najaf to An Nasiriyah. Brims refused. He did not assault the city. He surrounded it.
The 7th Armoured Brigade closed off every road in and out. The 16 Air Assault Brigade held the eastern approaches. The Royal Marines held the south. Then, for the next 2 weeks, the British did not attack. The pressure on Brims from the American side was extraordinary. Tommy Franks at CENTCOM wanted Basra taken.
The American media started running segments asking why the British were so cautious. Wait. Cautious? The same British who had flown Sea Kings into a sandstorm and cleared Umm Qasr building by building? Yeah. That was the framing. What Brims was doing was a doctrine. The doctrine the British Army had been refining for 50 years in places the Americans had no equivalent of.
Malaya, 1948 to 1960. Borneo, 1962 to 1966. Aden, 1963 to 1967. Northern Ireland, every year from 1969 until almost the day the invasion of Iraq began. The doctrine has a name. The soft cap. It says this. If you assault a city of a million civilians the way you assault an enemy army, you win the battle and you lose the population for a generation.
So, you do not assault it. You isolate it. You let the interior collapse. Then, when the time is right, you go in fast, you go in hard, you go to the symbolic heart, and you leave the rest standing. That is what Brims was doing for 14 days while the American media called it caution. While Donald Rumsfeld was asking in private what the British were actually doing down there.
The answer came on April 6th. The assault began at first light. AS90 self-propelled guns and RAF Tornado strike aircraft hit the Ba’ath Party headquarters and the Fedayeen command posts. The armored thrust was led by the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards and the Queen’s Royal Lancers in Challenger 2s with infantry from the Black Watch, >> [music] >> the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, and the Irish Guards in Warriors behind them.
Brigadier Binns made a call no American urban warfare manual at the time would have endorsed. Instead of clearing block by block, he drove his armored column straight into the symbolic heart. The Ba’ath Party headquarters, the Sheraton Hotel, the bridges over the Shatt al-Arab. He bypassed entire pockets of resistance.
He went for the things that would announce to every Iraqi ambassador that the regime was finished. Inside the Warriors, it was above 95 degrees. Soldiers in full kit heat fighting room by room with grenades and rifle butts. 42 Commando Royal Marines pushed in from the east along the waterway at the same time.
By the afternoon of April 6th, the Iraqi resistance broke. Not degraded. Broke. The Fedayeen scattered. The Ba’ath leadership fled or surrendered. By the evening of April 7th, the city was in British hands. 36 hours of direct assault. After 14 days of preparation, the largest city captured by British forces since the Second World War. And this is where we come back to the colonel on the street corner.
British soldiers were on the corners of Basra, not in helmets, in soft red and green berets, out in the open, talking to civilians, handing out water bottles. A deliberate, calculated, almost arrogant signal from British command. “We are not occupying you. We are here as soldiers, not as conquerors.” Within 30 minutes of clearing a building of armed fedayeen, the same Royal Marines were in conversation with the families on the same street.
This is the transition the American colonel could not understand. This is the moment his six-word question: “How the hell do they do that?” The answer in operational terms is 50 years of doing nothing else. The infantryman who took his helmet off on April 7th was the inheritor of a regimental tradition. His grandfather had done the same thing in Malaya.
His father had done it in Belfast. He had done it in Bosnia. The answer in cultural terms is what the American generals could not stop talking about. General Tommy Franks, the CENTCOM commander, the same man who’d been pressuring Brims to assault faster, later wrote that what Brims had demonstrated was operational patience and tactical brilliance, a textbook example of urban capture.
Lieutenant General James Conway said the British were the finest soldiers in the world at this kind of warfare. He praised their ability to switch from intense combat to peacekeeping within the same hour. He said he had not seen it done by any other army. Major General James Mattis, the [music] future Secretary of Defense, told his officers the British had demonstrated the patience to win without destroying what you are trying to save.
That line would end up in the American counterinsurgency doctrine 3 years later. Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, called the British performance in the South superb. Pause for a second and let that land. The Secretary of Defense of the United States in 19 days went from skeptical to superb. In 2006, General David Petraeus and General James Amos co-authored the United States Army and Marine Corps counterinsurgency field manual.
FM 3-24 became the operational Bible of the American surge in 2007 and shaped American operations in Afghanistan for the next decade. The principles in it, the patient approach, selective force, legitimacy over speed, protecting the civilian population first, are the principles the British Army had been refining since Malaya in the 1950s.
The American manual does not always cite the British directly. It does not need to. The men who wrote it had stood on the same street corners as that colonel. This is the part of the story told in glossy documentaries. The British arrived. They taught the Americans. The doctrine evolved. Everybody won. But that is not the whole story and anybody who tells you it is is lying to you.
The British paid for Basra in the assault and in the 4 years that followed. The soft cap that had won April 2003 could not, on its own, hold Basra in 2006. Sergeant Steven Roberts was killed on March the 24th, 2003 near He He given up his enhanced body armor because there was a shortage and another soldier needed it more.
The bullet that killed him would have been stopped by that armor. His widow, Samantha, would later force a public inquiry that changed how the British Army equipped its front-line troops. The political failure was not the soldiers. It was the men in suits who had sent them to war without the kit. Corporal of Horse Matty Hull of the Blues and Royals was killed on March the 28th in a friendly-fire incident.
An American A-10 attack aircraft mistook his patrol for Iraqi vehicles and engaged. The cockpit audio was later leaked. The pilot’s voice when he realizes what he has just done is one of the most painful artifacts of the war. A year later in Al Amarah, a Warrior driver named Johnson Beharry, originally from Grenada, drove his vehicle out of a rocket-propelled grenade ambush after his commander was incapacitated.
He saved every man inside. Five weeks later on June 11th, 2004, another rocket-propelled grenade detonated 6 in from his head. It fractured his skull. He reversed his Warrior out of the kill zone before losing consciousness. He spent months in a coma. On March 18th, 2005, he was awarded the Victoria Cross.
He was the first living recipient since 1969 and the first as Victoria Cross awarded to a British soldier since the Falklands. Write his name down. Johnson Beharry. In May 2004, soldiers of the Princess of Wales’ Royal Regiment at a place that came to be called Danny Boy, fixed bayonets and charged Mahdi army positions across open ground.
Roughly 28 enemy fighters were killed. No British dead in the charge. It was the first British bayonet charge since the Falklands. 179 British servicemen and women died on Operation Telic [music] between 2003 and 2009. 136 died in hostile action. And then came the part with no clean ending. By 2006, the Mahdi Army, the militia loyal to the Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, controlled significant parts of Basra.
The same patient doctrine the American generals had praised in 2003 was now being exploited as weakness by people who had figured out the British would not shoot back the way the Americans would. In 2007, British forces withdrew from Basra Palace, the last major British base inside the city, under a deal with local militias widely seen as a retreat.
In 2008, Iraqi army units backed by American forces ran Operation Charge of the Knights to retake the city. The same American officers who had praised the British in 2003 were now telling reporters off the record the British had lost what they had won. In 2009, the Chilcot Inquiry began. 7 years, 2.
6 million words, the longest public inquiry in British history. It concluded the United Kingdom had gone to war before peaceful options were exhausted. The intelligence [music] on weapons of mass destruction was wrong. The post-invasion planning was wholly inadequate. But the same report explicitly acknowledged British military personnel had served with courage and distinction.
The politicians failed. The soldiers did not. The British soldier on that Basra street corner, the one with the soft beret and the water bottle and the woman with the baby, was real. There were thousands of him. He represented the cleanest image the war ever produced, a doctrine 50 years in the making working exactly as it was supposed to.
But that image was taken in April 2003. By 2006, the same corner was a place where British patrols could not stop. By 2007, it was a place where British patrols could no longer go. The soldier in the beret had to put his helmet back on. The water bottle had to become a rifle. The conversation had to become a checkpoint.
The doctrine that had worked so brilliantly for 36 hours could not hold a city for 36 months. Not because the doctrine was wrong, because the war being fought around it changed faster than the men holding the corners could change with it. That is the lesson the American generals took from Basra.
Not just the patience, not just the soft caps, the harder lesson. The one that says you can win the battle, win it brilliantly, and still lose what came after. The British soldiers in Basra did everything right. The colonel watched from the other side of the street for a full minute. Then he turned and asked his six-word question. He never got a real answer.
He probably never will.
