Examines the U.S.Air Force strategic bombing campaign of Iraq & Iraqi armed forces occupying Kuwait from January 17th through February 28th, 1991 . Describes the aircraft & weapons, changes in technology & the reexamination & reapplication of traditional strategic bombing theory by USAF planning officers. Provides a chronological review of the campaign with an analysis of the results. Photos, maps, graphs & tables. Includes suggested readings.
In the Persian Gulf War the U.S. Air Force (USAF) demonstrated that a new era in strategic bombing had begun. Air power could now destroy key portions of a country's military and economic infrastructure without resort to nuclear weapons and heavy bombers and with low losses to both the attacker and enemy civilians. This achievement rested on technology, which both increased bombing accuracy and decreased the effectiveness of enemy defenses, and the reexamination and reapplication of traditional strategic bombing theory by USAF planning officers. Alone of the world's air forces the USAF possessed a 2,000-pound bomb designed to penetrate many feet of hardened concrete and steel. Its use destroyed the most heavily protected and important Iraqi targets. American anti-radar missiles intimidated Iraqi radar operators, leaving middle and upper altitudes free for Coalition air operations. American stealth technology, in the form of the F-117 A fighter gave the attacker virtual invulnerability while leaving the enemy defenseless. Behind this new technology lay the USAF planning officers, who laid out their offensive in a logical manner designed to minimize both friendly and enemy casualties while excising Iraq's military potential. The offensive, of course, did not achieve one hundred percent perfection, but it carried out its goals in a manner sure to make any future aggressor state hesitate to call such destruction down upon itself.
In the Persian Gulf War the U.S. Air Force (USAF) demonstrated that a new era in strategic bombing had begun. Air power could now destroy key portions of a county's military and economic infrastructure without resort to nuclear weapons and heavy bombers and with low losses to both the attacker and enemy civilians. This achievement rested on technology, which both increased bombing accuracy and decreased the effectiveness of enemy defenses, and the reexamination and reapplication of traditional strategic bombing theory by USAF planning officers.
This unique USAF publication outlines the role of strategic bombing in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. The U.S. Air Force (USAF) demonstrated that a new era in strategic bombing had begun. Air power could now destroy key portions of a country's military and economic infrastructure without resort to nuclear weapons and heavy bombers and with low losses to both the attacker and enemy civilians. This achievement rested on technology, which both increased bombing accuracy and decreased the effectiveness of enemy defenses, and the reexamination and reapplication of traditional strategic bombing theory by USAF planning officers. Alone of the world's air forces the USAF possessed a 2,000-pound bomb designed to penetrate many feet of hardened concrete and steel. Its use destroyed the most heavily protected and important Iraqi targets. American anti-radar missiles intimidated Iraqi radar operators, leaving middle and upper altitudes free for Coalition air operations. American stealth technology, in the form of the F-117A fighter gave the attacker virtual invulnerability while leaving the enemy defenseless. Behind this new technology lay the USAF planning officers, who laid out their offensive in a logical manner designed to minimize both friendly and enemy casualties while excising Iraq's military potential. The offensive, of course, did not achieve one hundred percent perfection, but it carried out its goals in a manner sure to make any future aggressor state hesitate to call such destruction down upon itself. From January 17 to February 28, 1991, aircraft of the United States Air Force (USAF), United States Navy (USN), and United States Marine Corps (USMC), under the control of the United States Central Command (USCENTCOM) as well as contingents of the air forces of eleven other western European and Arab countries, all under the aegis of the United Nations (U.N.), systematically attacked and destroyed targets inside Iraq and Iraqi armed forces occupying Kuwait. The air attack was the international community's response to Iraq's occupation of Kuwait, a small oil-rich Kingdom at the western end of the Persian Gulf, on August 2, 1990, and its obdurate refusal to abandon its conquest. The air war against Iraq consisted of two separate campaigns distinguished by different sets of targets. In the campaign in the Kuwaiti Theater of Operations (KTO)/ Coalition air forces had three objectives; suppression of Iraqi air defenses in the KTO; preparation of the battlefield for a planned Coalition ground attack (by striking Iraqi ground forces and interdicting Iraqi supply lines), and support of Coalition ground force operations with tactical airlift and aerial firepower. The second air campaign, the strategic bombardment of Iraq, struck at twelve sets of strategic targets. It sought to disrupt Iraq's air defense system, destroy its nuclear, biological and chemical weapons' research, production, and storage; demolish its offensive strategic weapon systems (short-range ballistic missiles [Scuds] and bombers); cripple its oil production and electrical industries; impair its war industry; and nullify its communications system. In addition, USAF planners hoped to "incapacitate" Saddam Hussein's regime. This objective had the readily apparent, but unstated, goal of creating a set of conditions within Iraq conducive to the overthrow of its political leadership. This work focuses on the use of strategic air power-on Coalition air operations devoted to the strategic bombardment of Iraq. It does not address directly the large-scale and deadly tactical air operations in the KTO, which consumed seventy-five percent of the total Coalition air effort.
This collection of essays reflects the proceedings of a 1991 conference on "The United States Air Force: Aerospace Challenges and Missions in the 1990s," sponsored by the USAF and Tufts University. The 20 contributors comment on the pivotal role of airpower in the war with Iraq and address issues and choices facing the USAF, such as the factors that are reshaping strategies and missions, the future role and structure of airpower as an element of US power projection, and the aerospace industry's views on what the Air Force of the future will set as its acquisition priorities and strategies. The authors agree that aerospace forces will be an essential and formidable tool in US security policies into the next century. The contributors include academics, high-level military leaders, government officials, journalists, and top executives from aerospace and defense contractors.
The war in the Persian Gulf in 1991 capped an era of USAF modernization and enhanced readiness begun in the late 1970s and that continued through the 1980s. The long lead-time weapons acquisition and training programs, begun a decade or more earlier, came to fruition against a far different opponent and in an unforeseen locale than that envisioned by their creators. The force designed to counter the superpower foe of the Cold War, the USSR, never fought a direct battle against that enemy during the existence of the Soviet Union. Instead, the USAF fought the first war of the so-called New World Order, a war that had as much in common with the colonial wars of the late nineteenth century as it had with the high-technology wars of the late twentieth century. The USAF shouldered the bulk of the fighting for the first thirty-nine of the conflict's forty-two days. This volume covers the air offensive against strategic military and economic targets within the pre-August 1990 borders of Iraq. The offensive air plan once again displayed the ability of the U.S. military to turn the necessity of improvisation into a virtue when, in mid-August 1990, an element of the Air Staff in the Pentagon wrote the basis of the offensive plan in ten days. The plan was founded upon the precepts of Col. John A. Warden III's air power theories-centers of gravity, shock effect, and the importance of leadership-related targets. Once the outline plan reached the arena of operations, the U.S. Central Air Forces (CENTAF), under the able leadership of Lt. Gen. Charles A. Horner, adopted the targeting philosophy of the plan and, after many modifications owing to new targets and an increased force structure, employed it with devastating effect.The author describes not only the outstanding performance of USAF men and machines but also the difficulties and complexities of coordinating the many elements of air and staff operations. Among these were the complex coordination of the fighters with their tankers, the speedy transmission of data from the allseeing eyes of AWACS and JSTARS aircraft, the multiple bomb runs over chemical and biological warfare bunkers, and the shortcomings of certain types of intelligence. All these factors impacted on mission effectiveness. The author also diagrams how outside influences-political pressure from neutrals, such as the Israelis, and from public news media-can affect the direction of the bombing effort.Although this account of the air campaign in the Persian Gulf concentrates on the operational history of a six-week war, it also places that war into its larger political and military context, especially in its tale of the interplay between the U.S. military and civilian leadership. It illustrates, with reference to actual missions, the operational advantages of stealth fighter bombers as well as their vulnerabilities.Davis presents the reader with a detailed account of one of the USAF's most important air operations in the last half of the twentieth century. In the decade after the conclusion of the Gulf War, the pattern of strategic air operations against Iraq became the template for USAF operations over Bosnia and during the air war over Serbia and, most recently, in Afghanistan as well. In planning for air operations in the Balkans, USAF officers were strongly influenced by John A. Warden's methodology and ideology with its emphasis on centers of gravity and strikes on leadership targets. Stealth air combat operations, inaugurated en masse in the Gulf War, became even more prevalent with the introduction of the B-2 bomber. Likewise, the use of precision weapons grew. The aversion of western democracies to both military and civilian casualties and their effect on targeting, tactics, and strategy first encountered over Iraq became more pronounced in subsequent conflicts-as did the continuing challenge in matching accurate intelligence to precision weapons.
From 16 January through 28 February 1991, the United States and its allies conducted one of the most operationally successful wars in history, a conflict in which air operations played a preeminent role. The Gulf War Air Power Survey was commissioned on 22 August 1991 to reviewall aspects of air warfare in the Persian Gulf for use by the United States Air Force, but it was not to confine itself to discussion of that institution.The Survey has produced reports on planning, the conduct of operations, the effects of the air campaign, command and control, logistics, air basesupport, space, weapons and tactics, as well as a chronology and a compendium of statistics on the war. It has prepared as well a summary report and some shorter papers and assembled an archive composed of paper, microfilm, and electronic records, all of which have been deposited at the Air Force Historical Research Agency at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. The Survey was just that, an attempt to provide a comprehensive and documented account of the war. It is not a definitive history: that will await the passage of time and the opening of sources (Iraqi records, for example) that were not available to Survey researchers. Nor is it a summary of lessons learned: other organizations, including many within the Air Force, have already done that. Rather, the Survey provides an analytical and evidentiary point of departure for future studies of the air campaign. It concentrates oil an analysis of the operational level of war in the belief that this level of warfare is at once one of the most difficult to characterize and one of the most important to understand. The Survey was directed by Dr. Eliot Cohen of Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies and was staffed by a mixture of civilian and military analysts, including retired officers from the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps. It was divided into task forces, most of which were run by civilians working temporarily for the Air Force. The work produced by the Survey was examined by a distinguished review committee, which included scholars, retired general officers from the Air Force, Navy, and Army, as well as former and current senior government officials. Throughout, the Survey strived to conduct its research in a spirit of impartiality and scholarly rigor. Its members had as their standard the observation of Mr. Franklin D'Olier, chairman of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey during and after the second World War: "We wanted to bum into everybody's souls that fact that the survey's responsibility... was to ascertain facts and to seek truth, eliminating completely any preconceived theories or dogmas."The Survey attempted to create a body of data common to all of the reports. Because one group of researchers compiled this core material while other task forces were researching and drafting other, more narrowly focused studies, it is possible that discrepancies exist among the reportswith regard to points of detail. More importantly, authors were given discretion, within the bounds of evidence and plausibility, to interpret events as they saw them. In some cases, task forces came to differing conclusions about particular aspects of this war. Such divergences of view were expected and even desired: the Survey was intended to serve as a point of departure for those who read its reports, and not their analytical terminus.
