Operation DESERT STORM: The Road Not Taken
On August 2, 1990, the very day when President Bush announced a plan to focus defense planning on regional conflicts, the Iraqi mechanized divisions of Saddam Hussein plunged across the border of Kuwait and in six days eliminated conventional military resistance against an outnumbered and uneven Kuwaiti defense force. On August 8, with his crack Republican Guard divisions closing on the border of Saudi Arabia, the Iraqi dictator declared the “lost province” of Kuwait annexed to Iraq. Saddam Hussein condemned the Kuwaiti ruling family, the al-Sabahs, for mistreating foreign workers and supporting Iraqi dissidents; however, for Saddam the invasion represented primarily a financial coup de main that would place Kuwaiti oil in Iraqi hands. It was a desperate attempt to increase the oil revenues that he needed to pay his war debts, rebuild his army and air force, pacify his core Sunni Muslim supporters, pursue his grandiose plans to build nuclear and chemical strategic weapons, and replace the now-lost largesse from the Soviet Union and the anti-Iranian Western nations. The Iraqi conquest of Kuwait also put Saudi Arabia at risk; the loss of the Saudi kingdom would have created a global oil crisis and destroyed for the second time in a decade the American effort to develop a rich Islamic partner in the Middle East. (Egypt met the religious test but not the prosperity standards.) An unchallenged Iraqi victory there would have increased the danger to Israel and to every established Arab regime in the region. Despite the gnawing suspicion that American diplomacy had appeased rather than warned Saddam Hussein, the Bush administration quickly rallied, and on August 5 the president declared that he would wage war if necessary to restore Kuwait’s independence.
The American-led coalition of twenty-four nations that won the Gulf War by March 1991 did not spring to arms automatically or easily, and to a large degree the Bush administration earned the dramatic military victory in the face of considerable political odds. The first challenge was to persuade the Saudi ruling family, led by King Fahd ibn Abdul-Aziz, to permit American troops to come by the thousands and inundate a highly structured, traditional Muslim society with young Westerners, including female service personnel. After some debate the ruling elders of the House of Saud admitted that the Iraqi army posed the greater danger and pledged their full cooperation to Bush’s envoy, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, on August 7, 1990. A key American ally in the negotiations was Prince Bandar ibn Sultan, the ambassador to Washington. The first diplomatic victory forced more frenetic international activity to isolate Iraq and muster overwhelming power to protect Saudi Arabia and, eventually, persuade Saddam Hussein to bring his army home. The United States used the United Nations as a major forum for coalition diplomacy, and between August and November 1990 the United Nations called for several kinds of sanctions to free Kuwait. Ultimately, the UN Security Council authorized the use of force to defeat Iraq if it did not withdraw from Kuwait by January 15, 1991.
Using the United Nations to give the rescue mission international legitimacy did not solve all the difficulties that faced Secretary of State Jim Baker. One major task was to prevent the Soviet Union, staggering but still potent, from providing any military assistance to Iraq or attempting to mediate a separate peace settlement. Although the Russians played coy, Gorbachev again bowed to reality and stepped to the sidelines in January 1991. In addition, Baker had to tolerate all sorts of instant peacemakers, foreign and domestic, whose futile exertions were cleverly encouraged by Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz.
Iraq entered the confrontation with several frightening trump cards. It held over 2 million foreign nationals hostage, about 8,000 of whom came from the United States, other NATO nations, and Japan. Iraq also had a chemical and bacteriological warfare capability, and Western intelligence knew that its nuclear weapons program had advanced to a dangerous stage. These “weapons of mass destruction” made the potential targets determined to eliminate them. The United States, however, did not want one of these target nations, Israel, to join the coalition since its commitment would give Saddam more credibility when he called for holy war and radical rebellion by the Arab masses against “pro-Israeli” Arab governments. King Hussein of Jordan, in fact, tilted toward Iraq, and President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt waffled, for both faced real internal threats. It became essential to keep Israel out of the war; otherwise, Baker feared, his Muslim partners would leave the Western coalition.
In addition to ensuring that some nations would not participate, American diplomacy recruited a true international force—and not one bought with American dollars. Twenty-three other nations contributed air and ground forces of some kind, ranging from full divisions to medical and chemical warfare teams. Twenty-three navies participated in operations in the Middle East and Mediterranean as well as eleven different air forces and twenty-two different armies. Turkey made a major contribution outside the Kuwaiti Theater of Operations (KTO) by massing its forces on Iraq’s northern border to produce a second front, and it opened its air bases to U.S. Air Force units. The military units from NATO countries fit easily into a system of coalition command, but to recognize Saudi participation and Arab sensitivities, the ground units of the Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman) remained under the command of Saudi Lieutenant General Khalid ibn Sultan rather than the formal coalition theater commander, General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, U.S. Army and commanding general of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), the successor of the RDJTF. Outside of General Khalid’s command, the largest Allied contingents were a British armored division and a French light armored division. Showing many flags along the “line drawn in the sand” did not exhaust American diplomatic goals; unlike the purchased Allied participation in Korea and Vietnam, the United States wanted some help—a great deal of help—with the direct costs of the war, estimated later at $100 billion from the treasury of the United States. The “United Fund” for the alliance reached $54 billion pledged and paid after the war’s end; outside of the Gulf Cooperation Council the largest donors were Japan, Germany, and Korea. Other nations provided base rights, services in kind, relief funds, and subventions to the cause.
The Bush administration’s successful diplomacy helped provide domestic political legitimacy to the intervention. The tides of support and reservation ebbed and flowed through Congress, the national media, and the public; approval of Bush’s early actions slipped away as August cooled into October, for serious questions arose about the nature, scope, and duration of the commitment. In November 1990 one national poll found that the public could muster a majority for only one reason to attack Iraq: To destroy its nuclear weapons. Only about one-third favored restoring the Kuwaiti government or protecting Middle East oil. Foreign policy gurus of both political parties clucked over the dangers of an extended ground war, the Iraqi use of nuclear or chemical weapons, and the danger of alienating the Arab world forever. Not until January 12, 1991, did Congress vote its support for the war, 52–47 in the Senate and 250–183 in the House. Another concern was the fate of the Western hostages, but Saddam Hussein, in one of several major miscalculations, released them in December. Calls for peaceful negotiations came from virtually every European capital, influenced by Iraqi threats of terrorism and Saddam’s demand for a final Palestinian solution. Whipsawed between his instinct to lead a crusade against Saddam Hussein and his craving for public approval, George Bush himself swayed in the breeze, but he had already set in motion a military juggernaut that he feared he would have to use to free Kuwait, if only in order to restore world confidence in America’s will to use force.
Dubbed Operation DESERT SHIELD, Central Command hastily patched together a rump version of a Middle East contingency plan (1002–90), and on August 7 the first F-15s landed in Saudi Arabia, followed by transports bearing the ready brigade of the U.S. 82d Division (Airborne). Their mission was simple: deter or stop an Iraqi invasion of Saudi Arabia. Only eight weeks later would Schwarzkopf’s subordinate commanders feel certain they could accomplish this task. When the D
ESERT SHIELD deployment began, General Powell and the Joint Chiefs believed they would need four months to get an adequate force of 250,000 into the KTO and its relevant waters. Moving troops stretched Transportation Command’s air fleet beyond capacity, and civilian charter carriers had to fill the breach. Before the war ended aircraft had moved almost 500,000 troops and almost 600,000 tons of supplies to the Gulf.
But the logistical foundation of a high-technology foreign war, especially one using mechanized and airmobile ground forces, must move by sea. Fewer than 3,000 troops (mostly drivers) came by sea, but ships brought 3.4 million tons of supplies and equipment and 6.1 million tons of fuel. Unlike similar buildups in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, adequate port facilities awaited the vessels; unlike World War II, no lurking submarines took their toll. Even with a decade of preparation, the logistical basis for a major air war, especially the stockpiling of fuel and ordnance, required mighty labors. Improvisation and extemporized organization—including vast contracting to Middle Eastern businesses—became the order of the day and transformed the Saudi kingdom into a military bazaar. In the meantime Schwarzkopf’s principal forces fell into place—or, rather, drove out into the desert: the Army’s 82d Division (Airborne), 101st Division (Air Assault), and 24th Infantry Division (Mechanized); and the I Marine Expeditionary Force, an integrated air-ground team of one mechanized division and one tactical aircraft wing of fighter-bombers and helicopters. Air Forces Central Command under Lieutenant General Charles Horner, a joint and combined air component based on land and abroad carriers, had 600 Air Force combat aircraft of eight types and the Navy three (soon four) carrier groups available. Total allied air strength in the theater in September 1990 was over 1,200 planes.
As the diplomats pulled and the logisticians hauled, the Bush administration looked into the future in October–November 1990 and saw no easy light at the end of the sandstorm. A dictator with no significant internal opposition (at least no one who could kill him before he killed them), Saddam Hussein believed time was on his side. His own forces redeployed to defend Kuwait, regular army divisions were sent to the Saudi border to hunker down in elaborate sand fortifications and barriers, the crack mechanized Republican Guard divisions deployed as a mobile reserve west and north of Kuwait City. Estimates of Iraqi divisions in the KTO ran as high as thirty-six divisions, with 400,000–450,000 troops and 4,000 tanks. (Although electronics intelligence and photo reconnaissance could provide order-of-battle information, it could not gauge morale, training readiness, or the actual numbers of effectives, only “bean counts” of equipment and unit identifications.) From a coalition perspective, the Iraqis looked formidable, especially if they used their estimated 3,000 artillery pieces to spray the front with poison gas. Economic sanctions against Iraq took their bite in September; oil no longer left Iraq and few goods (including food) came in by air or sea. The economic embargo became a naval blockade. The coalition navies patrolled the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, especially the latter, since Iraq tried to slip supplies through Aqaba, the historic port of timorous Jordan. The navies challenged 7,500 merchant ships, conducted 964 boardings, fired 11 warning shots, and forced 51 ships to divert, with 90 percent of the incidents in the Red Sea. The economic war had, however, no appreciable impact on Saddam Hussein’s will or his army’s capability.
In early October the president asked whether the Joint Chiefs or the Central Command had an offensive plan for the liberation of Kuwait. The answer was “not quite,” although Cheney, Powell, and Schwarzkopf had discussed the option. They assumed that any offensive campaign would involve a massive air action, surpassing the scale of LINEBACKER operations in Vietnam in 1972; they also thought some ground campaign would be necessary but paled at the possible casualties. In fact, no senior military officer showed much enthusiasm for a ground attack. Nevertheless, Central Command tried its hand at some preliminary plans utilizing the force that would be on the ground in December and produced concepts that looked more like the Battle of the Somme than Patton’s drive across France in 1944. The problem was clearly the numbers and structure of the existing forces, so light and amphibious that any ground campaign would have to hug the coast. No matter how the joint planners struggled in Washington or Saudi Arabia, they could not produce an option of quick victory and light casualties unless the United States doubled its forces in the KTO. On November 8 Bush announced he would increase the American forces in order to create an offensive capability. The Joint Chiefs knew the numbers: Two heavy divisions and an armored cavalry regiment of the U.S. VII Corps would leave Germany for Saudi Arabia and draw into its structure two more heavy divisions from the United States, the 1st Infantry Division (Mechanized) and the 1st Cavalry Division (Armored). The Marine Corps would add another division to the I MEF and place a second amphibious brigade in the Gulf. The Navy would roughly double its ships in the area, and the Air Force would increase its operational squadrons by about one-third. The allies would also enlarge their committed forces.
The expanded size of DESERT SHIELD forced Bush to face a serious popular test of his commitment: the mobilization of military reservists for extended active duty that might last as long as two years. The first call in August brought 40,000 reservists to active duty; three more calls from November until January brought the number of activated reservists to 227,800, and an additional 10,000 volunteered for active duty. Though facing income losses and job insecurity, the reservists rallied to the colors, and 46 percent of them eventually served in the KTO. Moreover, the mobilization of reservists from all the services dramatized both the enduring strengths and weaknesses of the Total Force program. Three Army National Guard armor and infantry brigades could not meet deployment standards without additional intensive training and never reached the Gulf. Almost half of Army active-duty and reserve medical personnel could not meet deployment standards, and about one-fifth of all reservists proved unfit by training, physical condition, employment, or dependency. The active force faced a major problem of the “new age” military: About 25,000 service personnel could not deploy unless they made arrangements for others to care for their children. On the plus side, reservists of all the services and levels of military experience, from Vietnam veterans to high-school youths, fell in and soldiered alongside their active counterparts. Reserves provided the muscle of the logistics organization. Air Force reserve personnel became indistinguishable from their regular counterparts, and Army National Guard artillery and engineer battalions served with distinction in combat. as did the Marine reserve battalions augmenting the I MEF. On balance, the Total Force program worked at both the political and operational levels.
As DESERT SHIELD Phase II flooded Saudi Arabia with additional forces, military planners in Washington and Riyadh created the broad concepts for an offensive war against Iraq, working under the political guidance of Cheney and the strategic vision of General Powell, Air Force Chiefs of Staff Michael Dugan and Merrill McPeak, General Schwarzkopf, and General Horner. Representatives from the Navy and Marine Corps provided their expertise on Schwarzkopf’s and Horner’s staffs, but the naval services were not satisfied that real “jointness” characterized the planning. In any event, the planners all assumed that an offensive campaign characterized by speed of decision and tolerable casualties required an enormous air offensive. Although relatively untested by Iran, Iraq’s air-defense system looked formidable: A Soviet-style, highly integrated system of 1,000 aircraft (protected in concrete bunkers), 7,000 antiaircraft guns, and 10,000 antiaircraft missiles, all linked with redundant radar systems and communications nets. Clearly, this system would have to be defeated, but it could not have high priority alone. The Iraqis also had an estimated 600 Scud missiles, mobile and fixed, capable of hitting targets as far away as Tel Aviv and Riyadh; these missiles could carry chemical and biological weapons as well as high explosives. The air planners also planned to strike Iraq’s fixed political and military headquarters, its arms factories (including suspected nuclear weapons facilities), its
military bases, and its communications-electrical power systems. The planners envisioned a thirty-day campaign that would start with a “strategic” air war on Iraq proper, then shift to the Iraqi forces in Kuwait. If a ground campaign proved necessary, air attrition would pave the way.
With their memories of the frustrations of the Vietnam War, the air offensive planners envisioned a bold strike, of an intensity dictated only by the plans, the weather, the air forces capability, and the enemy, not by the media or by political irresolution. One way to ensure this operational freedom, which would exploit tactical and technological surprise, was to destroy the targets (some 400 sets in the air war plan) with a minimum loss of civilian lives. This requirement meant that Iraq’s air-defense system had to be overwhelmed, so that the coalition bombers could use their new-generation precision-guided munitions without annoyance. Untested in real war since 1975 but trained and exercised throughout the 1980s, the massed air forces (2,600 aircraft, 1,900 of them American) had resources not fully appreciated by their own users, let alone the Iraqis. The aircraft and munitions themselves had been electronically mated with their targets with new precision, based on terminal guidance systems that gave precise thermal or visual aim points. The strike aircraft could find their targets under the direction of airborne air control (AWACS) and airborne ground target acquisition (JSTARS) systems, and they could be assisted by a fleet of aerial refuelers and electronic war aircraft. Teams of aircraft were prepared to hunt out and destroy all air-defense radar systems, assisted by Air Force and Army special operations helicopters. The major new capability was the F-117A Stealth attack bomber, whose radar-defeating characteristics made it invisible at night. To its own air capability the U.S. Navy added the Tomahawk cruise missile, also capable of precision attacks and terrain-following navigation right to the sites of Iraqi guns.
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