• DOI:10.2307/2539059
• Corpus ID: 154290155

How Kuwait Was Won: Strategy in the Gulf War

@article{Freedman2019HowKW,
  title={How Kuwait Was Won: Strategy in the Gulf War},
  author={Lawrence Freedman and Efraim Karsh},
  journal={International Security},
  year={2019},
  volume={16},
  pages={41 - 5}
}

• Lawrence Freedman, Efraim Karsh
• Published 23 January 1991
• Political Science
• International Security

T h e dust has yet to settle after the 1991 Gulf War and it may not settle for some time. After the grand finale of the 100-hour land campaign came the confusion of the Shi'ite and Kurdish insurrection and the torrent of refugees into Turkey and Iran. The accumulation of human suffering, material decline, and environmental damage did not stop with the fighting. Nor were the political futures of either Iraq or Kuwait settled, nor the responsibilities of the victorious powers for the peace and security of the area concluded. Whatever the political outcome, the most important feature of the Gulf War in military terms was its decisive, overwhelming character. At no point did Iraq offer any serious resistance. Its air force retreated in the face of combat; its small navy, which had nowhere to hide, was decimated in a sideshow; the army crumbled in the face of the coalition advance. The strategy that led to the victory-a relatively protracted and systematic air campaign followed by a land campaign based on envelopment and maneuver-was fully advertised beforehand. So was the Iraqi strategy based on threatening the United States with a "second Vietnam" and absorbing the air offensive.' In this article we demonstrate how the strategies of both sides in the Gulf War were governed by a sensitivity to its political context, both domestically and internationally. It was widely expected that Iraqi forces would only be expelled from Kuwait following a ferocious land battle. This created a severe risk of extremely high American casualties, given that the United States was providing the bulk of the coalition forces ranged against Iraq. This put the