I recently saw a documentary about the Battle of 73 Easting (I believe it's part of a series called "Greatest Tank Battles"). I had a few questions
1.) In the recreation, they state that the American forces rapidly closed the gap, drove straight in and intermingled with the Iraqi armor. I found that a bit confusing because it is my understanding that the US Army focused on long range gunnery, and that the Abrams would be better protected at long distances. Why did they choose to charge in rather than use of their advantages?
2.) They indicated that the Iraqi army tanks were entrenched in defensive positions. I understand that the Iraqi army was not as well trained, but there was an account where a Bradley managed to fire its missiles, reload and fire again before any Iraqi tanks returned fire. How were the Iraqis caught so unprepared that they lost all the advantages of being in prepared defensive positions?
In response to the second question, Stephen Biddle wrote a paper about the performance of US and Iraqi forces in the Gulf War (and what might have been the decisive factor). In it he notes that at 73 Easting the Iraqis likely hadn't established effective watch posts/routines, and hence were taken by suprise when US forces attacked. He also noted many Iraqi vehicles either had no crew or a skeleton crew only. So the Iraqis essentially would have been slow to react due to the shock, and then weren't actually in a position to return fire immediately anyway due to lack of crews.
Here is the article, you can probably skip to "Iraqi Force Employment Mistakes" but I thought the whole thing was interesting.