We spent 10x the annual Iraqi military budget to lose 5000 dead. If we had spent the Iraqi military budget, we might have had a lot more situations similar to what happened to that Iraqi armored column. The situations where we did well were when we had the initiative, i.e. conducting raids against insurgents in the small hours of the morning. The ones where we lost most of our men were when they were ambushed with mines and booby traps while on patrol. The Iraqis wandered into one of those situations while advancing pell-mell into Indian country without the benefit of CAS or arty support (tube or MLRS) and paid the price.
Don’t overlook how difficult it is to combat IED attacks. Most are emplaced at night and in many areas we had IR reconnaissance balloons, Specter gunships, Kiowas, Apaches, drones and other IR assets aloft looking for them at night.
Considering the IA’s assets and abilities I think their best tactic is to swarm an area and kill all the fighters and anyone who flees. It’ll be expensive in martyr power but it will work. This is how the Russians defeated the Germans in ‘43 - ‘45.