their performance was awful in virtually every category of military effectiveness. Military intelligence, initiative, and small unit independent action was virtually absent. After the war, Iraq started a major military build-up. Active duty manpower doubled, and so did number of divisions, from six to twelve, of which four were now armoured and two mechanised infantry. Iran–Iraq war Later, Saddam Hussein, looking to build fighting power against Iran soon after the outbreak of the Iran–Iraq War doubled the size of the Iraqi Army. In 1981, Pollack writes it numbered 200,000 soldiers in 12 divisions and 3 independent brigades, but by 1985, it reached 500,000 men in 23 divisions and nine brigades. An April 1983 CIA estimate suggests that Iraq had at that time five armoured; seven infantry; and two mechanised infantry divisions with ten more forming ("several are probably already operational"). The first new divisions were created in 1981 when the 11th and 12th Border Guard Divisions were converted into infantry formations and the 14th Infantry Division was formed. Yet the rise in number of divisions is misleading, because during the war Iraqi divisions abandoned a standard organisation with permanent ('organic') brigades assigned to each division. Instead division headquarters were assigned a mission or sector and then assigned brigades to carry out the task - up to eight to ten brigades on some occasions. The war came at a great cost in lives and economic damage - a half a million Iraqi and Iranian soldiers as well as civilians are believed to have died in the war with many more injured and wounded - but brought neither reparations nor change in borders. The conflict is often compared to World War I, in that the tactics used closely mirrored those of the 1914–1918 war, including large scale trench warfare, manned machine-gun posts, bayonet charges, use of barbed wire across trenches and on no-mans land, human wave attacks by Iran, and Iraq's extensive use of chemical weapons (such as mustard gas) against Iranian troops and civilians as well as Iraqi Kurds. Invasion of Kuwait and the Persian Gulf War By the eve of the Invasion of Kuwait which led to the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the army was estimated to number 1,000,000 men. Just before the Persian Gulf War began, the force comprised 47 infantry divisions plus 9 armoured and mechanised divisions, grouped in 7 corps. This gave a total of about 56