PIN : 909253–000

War in the

persian Gulf

Operations

Desert Shield and Desert Storm

August 1990–March 1991

Center of Military History

United States Army

Washington, D.C., 2010
CMH Pub 70–117–1

First Printing

Cover: On Guard at Sunset by Peter Varisano.
iii

Contents

Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v

Strategic Setting: The Army on the Eve of War in the Gulf. . . . . . . . 1

Operations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

The First Deployments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Support of the Deployed Forces. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Host-Nation Support and Contracting. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Transportation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

“Deforger 90”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

Mobilizing the Reserve Components. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

Planning for the Offensive. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

Operation Desert Storm. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

Attack on Khafji. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

The 100-hour Ground War. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

 Day One: 24 February 1991. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35

 Day Two: 25 February 1991. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44

 Day Three: 26 February 1991. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49

 Day Four: 27 February 1991. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57

	 	 Cease-fire. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63

Analysis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64

Epilogue. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67

Abbreviations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71

Map Symbols. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73

Further Readings. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75

Maps

No.

1. Desert Shield/Desert Storm Area of Operations: 1990–1991. . . viii

2. Supplying the Troops: December 1990. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

3. Preparing for the Ground War: January–February 1991. . . . . . . . 30

4. Ground War: Situation 24 February 1991. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36

Page
iv

5. Ground War: Situation 25 February 1991. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46

6. Ground War: Situation 26 February 1991. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52

7. Ground War: Situation 27 February 1991. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58

Illustrations

General H. Norman Schwarzkopf Jr.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Lt. Gen. John J. Yeosock. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Lt. Gen. Gary E. Luck. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

The 82d Airborne Division at Pope Air Force Base. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Maj. Gen. William G. Pagonis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

Tapline Road. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

Lt. Gen. Frederick M. Franks Jr. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

VII Corps assembly area in Saudi Arabia. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

MOPP Medics in the Desert. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

Troops training in trenches. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

Patriot missile battery. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

M1A1 Abrams tank. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40

The 1st Armored Division pushes north. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43

Desert Storm, 101st Style. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49

Multiple-launch rocket system battery. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51

Night Attack. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55

Burning oil fields in Kuwait. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63

Illustrations courtesy of the following sources: pp. 7, Randall M. 

Yackiel; 16, LaDona S. Kirkland; 22, 33, 40, 43, 51, 63, Defense Visual 

Information Directorate; 28, Randall R. Anderson. All other illustrations 

from Department of the Army files.

No. Page
v

Introduction

Although now twenty years in the past, the events surrounding the 

invasion of Kuwait by the forces of Saddam Hussein in August 1990 and 

the subsequent U.S.-led coalition that ejected the Iraqis from that small 

nation are key to understanding today’s situation in the Middle East. 

For the first time, the United States was directly and openly involved in

sending major land forces to Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf region. 

For the first time since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the U.S. Army, which

had trained to fight Soviet forcesin Central Europe, moved a large portion

of those forces to engage in open warfare in a completely different theater 

against a former Soviet client state. The overwhelming success of those 

endeavors, Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, renewed the 

confidence and assertiveness of the United States in its foreign policy in

the Near East and throughout the world. 

Other elements of what later became known as the first Gulf War

also remain with us. American troops stayed in the region for over two 

decades, first containing a resurgent Saddam Hussein and then dealing

with his aftermath. Equally important, the coalition partnerships cemented 

in that initial operation and in the regional peacekeeping operations that 

followed provided the basis for a growing series of multinational efforts 

that have characterized the post–Cold War environment. Finally, the 

growing interoperability of U.S. air, sea, and land forces coupled with the 

extensive employment of more sophisticated weapons based on advanced 

electronic technologies, first showcased in Desert Storm, have become 

the hallmark of American military operations and the standard that other 

nations strive to meet.

This pamphlet, prepared by the Center’s Chief Historian, Dr. Richard 

Stewart, is based primarily on two works. The first is the Center’s The 

Whirlwind War: The United States Army in Operations Desert Shield

and Desert Storm, Frank N. Schubert and Theresa L. Kraus, general 

editors, prepared about a year after the events in question. The second 

is a chapter written by Brig. Gen. John Sloan Brown (former Chief of 

Military History, now retired) in the Center’s comprehensive history of 

the U.S. Army, American Military History, vol. 2, The United States 

Army in a Global Era, 1917–2008. I hope that soldiers of all ranks will 
vi

enjoy this short account of a conflict that twenty years ago captured the

attention of the world asthe first test of the U.S. Army since the Vietnam

War and its first large-scale armor engagement since World War II.

Washington, D.C. JEFFREY J. CLARKE

28 May 2010 Chief of Military History
War in the

persian Gulf

Operations

Desert Shield and Desert Storm

August 1990–March 1991
JALIBAH

TALLIL

KING KHALID MILITARY CITY

QAISUMAH

RAS MISHAB

ALI AL SALEM AIRBASE

KUWAIT INTERNATIONAL

AHMED AL JABER

AIRBASE

KING FAYD INTERNATIONAL

KING ABDUL AZIZ AIRBASE

KING KHALID INTERNATIONAL

RIYADH INTERNATIONAL

AL ARTAWIYAH SOUTH BURAYDAH

RAFHA

DHAHRAN INTERNATIONAL

JUBAYL

Wādī al Bāţin

Tigris River

Euphrates River

P E R S I A N

G U L F H ̧ afar al Bāţin

KUWAIT

Al Jubayl

Ad Dammām

Dhahran

RIYADH

Ahvāz As Samāwah 

Khorramshahr

Abādān Al Başrah

BAGHDAD

An Nāşirīyah

Ra’s al Khaī

Ar Ruqī

S A U D I A R A B I A

I R A Q

K U W A I T

I R A N

1990–1991

AREA OF OPERATIONS

DESERT SHIELD/DESERT STORM

Air Base

Miles

0 150

Map 1
War in the Persian Gulf

Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm

August 1990–March 1991

In the early morning hours of 2 August 1990, Iraqi dictator Saddam 

Hussein launched an overwhelming invasion of tiny, oil-rich Kuwait. 

(Map 1) The United States Army, reveling in the end of the Cold War 

and on the verge of downsizing, faced a new and unexpected challenge. 

The fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 had changed the 

strategic equation, not only in Europe but throughout the world. Within 

a few years, Soviet troops evacuated all of their former satellites in the 

Warsaw Pact, those satellitesreconfigured themselves asindependent and

democratic states, the Soviet Union itself collapsed into fifteen different

countries, and Germany reunited into a single nation. This collapse left 

the United States as the sole remaining superpower in a new, unsettled 

world. The United States came to have more responsibilities around the 

globe and more strategic maneuver room to intervene in foreign crises 

with less risk of catastrophic confrontation with the Soviet Union. At 

the same time, client states of the former Soviet Union—from Eastern 

Bloc Europe to Cuba to the Middle East—found themselves without their 

traditional patron and without the military and diplomatic restraint that 

patron-client relationship had provided in the past. One former Soviet 

client, the Ba’athist Iraq of Saddam Hussein, certainly felt empowered 

to press its luck.

Strategic Setting: The Army on the Eve of War in the Gulf

The Army at the end of the Cold War was a very different institution 

than the one that had emerged from the sting of defeat in Vietnam less than 

two decades before. That earlier Army, its confidence in ruins and struggling to rebuild itself as a volunteer force, virtually reinvented itself from 

the bottom up. Employing new doctrine, reinvigorated leadership, renewed 

emphasis on realistic training, and a full-court press to rearm and reequip 

itself to fight a modern war anywhere in the world, the Army in 1990 was

small (in comparison with the army of the Vietnam era), highly trained, 

and fully professional. It was a high-quality force prepared to fight an

intense war against a first-classfoe. However, the collapse of Soviet power
2

and withdrawal of Soviet armies into the Soviet Union, the disintegration 

of the Warsaw Pact, and the dismemberment and disappearance of the 

Soviet Union seemed to many to remove the justification for maintaining

a powerful U.S. Army. Political leaders sought a “peace dividend,” and 

the Army projected budgets that would decrease the number of its active 

service members from seven hundred eighty thousand in 1989 to five

hundred thirty-five thousand in 1995. Some Americans believed long-term

peace was the order of the day and that we could dismantle our “bloated” 

military establishment. That “bloated” establishment would soon show the 

world how effective, and needed, it was. The United States would send 

the best-prepared force America had ever deployed in response to naked 

aggression in the Persian Gulf.

As Saddam Hussein’s attack unfolded, three armored divisions of 

the elite Iraqi Republican Guard crossed the Kuwaiti border and sped 

toward the capital city. The several brigades and potpourri of military 

equipment of the hapless Kuwaiti Army, already disorganized by attacks 

from Iraqi special operations forces, proved no match for this assault. 

Within days, the Kuwaitis had surrendered or fled to Saudi Arabia, the

Republican Guard divisions had closed to the Saudi border, and Iraqi 

follow-on forces had fanned out to secure the oil fields and commercial

wealth of the small but prosperous country. Iraq had long coveted oilrich Kuwait, characterizing it as a nineteenth province the British had 

purloined during the colonial era. Iraq’s ambition had become aggravated 

during the prolonged, desultory Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988). Hussein 

had accrued enormous debts fighting the Iranians, leaving him with a

large and battle-hardened army but an economy in disarray. The wealth 

of Kuwait, in his mind, could fix this problem.

Hussein’s army had grown tenfold during the war with Iran. When 

fully mobilized, it numbered over a million soldiers. Perhaps more 

important, it was well equipped by the virtue of huge purchases from 

international arms markets. Although most of this equipment was of 

Soviet design and a generation behind its American counterparts, the 

sheer numbers of tanks, armored fighting vehicles, artillery pieces, and

small arms of all types made it formidable. Although the Soviet Union 

was no longer available to assist Iraq internationally, Hussein could 

count on support among the most polarized or disaffected elements of 

the Arab World. Iraq’s standing as a “Sunni Shield” against the power 

of resurgent Shi’ite Iran made many Arab states loath to confront him 

directly. For many in the region, Kuwait was seen as little more than 

an American dependency, and defiance of Israel’s ally America was

righteous in many Arabs’ eyes.
3

For the American government and President George H. W. Bush, 

the first priority quickly became the defense of Saudi Arabia. Disruption

of Kuwaiti oil supplies was damaging enough to the global economy; 

disruption of Saudi oil supplies could be disastrous. The Saudis shared 

Bush’s view, and their leadership overcame an established national 

antipathy toward allowing foreign troops into their kingdom. On 6 

August, Saudi King Fahd bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud formally approved 

American intervention to assist in the defense of his kingdom.

U.S. forces rapidly began to move to Saudi Arabia. Initial forces 

included two F–15 squadrons; Maritime Pre-positioned Squadrons 2 and 

3, based on the islands of Diego Garcia and Guam; two carrier battle 

groups; the ready brigade of the 82d Airborne Division; and an airborne 

warning and control system (AWACS) unit. Much more would follow. 

Secretary of Defense Richard B. Cheney, at the direction of President 

Bush, unleashed what became arguably the most concentrated and 

complex projection of American military power since World War II. 

The initial missions of these forces were to protect Saudi Arabia and the 

Saudi oil fields from Iraq and to prevent further aggression. No decision

had yet been made to turn that defensive mission into an offensive one 

to roll back Iraqi gains.

Operations

The first days of August began an anxiousseveral weeksfor American

defense planners, especially after the 82d Airborne Division’s ready 

brigade arrived on the scene. The staff of the U.S. Central Command 

(CENTCOM), commanded by General H. Norman Schwarzkopf Jr., 

knew the levels of risk they undertook as they sought to balance the proportions of support and combat troops coming into theater. Recognizing 

the enormous armored wherewithal of the Iraqis just across the border, 

the lightly armed paratroopers of the 82d characterized themselves as 

“speed bumps,” intended at best to delay an Iraqi attack—and to signal 

the determination of the United States to defend Saudi Arabia with 

American lives. This in turn would buy time for the buildup of forces.

Every effort was made to effect a rapid buildup of combat power 

and logistical support. Although U.S. forces were at risk for a number of 

weeks, compared to historical precedent the American buildup in Saudi 

Arabia progressed quickly and efficiently. In a little over two months,

the powerful XVIII Airborne Corps, consisting of an airborne division, 

an air-assault division, two heavy divisions, an armored cavalry regiment 

(ACR), and the requisite array of combat support (CS) and combat service 

support (CSS) assets, had deployed. The arriving inventory included 
4

over 120,000 troops, 700 tanks, 

1,400 armored fighting vehicles,

and 600 artillery pieces. This is not 

to mention the 32,000 troops and 

400 tanks provided by local Arab 

allies. Hundreds of planes were 

in theater operating out of Saudi, 

Turkish, and Qatari airfields, with

more operating off of American 

aircraft carriers and long-range 

bombers able to range the theater 

from Diego Garcia and even from 

the United States. The Navy was on 

hand and active in the Persian Gulf 

and its approaches, having already 

imposed an effective blockade 

on Iraq. The risk of Iraqi attack 

receded after the first few weeks,

but the need to prepare for any 

eventuality remained.

How to use the newly arriving forces to best effect was a critical 

concern. Although Central Command had contingency plans to defend 

Saudi Arabia from the Soviet Union or its allies from the earliest days 

of the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force created in 1979, these plans 

were not up to date. Central Command and its service component 

commands worked on a unified campaign plan for the defense of Saudi

Arabia during much of 1990, primarily via a computer-facilitated war 

game entitled Internal Look 90. The simulation yielded considerable 

insight, but plans were incomplete and had not yet been presented to the 

Joint Chiefs of Staff or the services for review. Lack of an approved plan 

proved especially significant during the fluid situation of August. Had an

approved unified campaign plan been in place, it would have provided to

the services detailed lists of force requirements. It took time to identify 

relevant requirements and then to match these requirements with specific

units. The problem became particularly acute when identifying the 

many separate units needed to support a large force in the desert: waterpurification companies, tactical petroleum terminal units, engineer real

estate detachments, and medium-truck companies. Deployment lists drive 

service access to reserve capabilities. This in turn becomes contingent on 

political decisions by the president to mobilize the necessary reserves. 

During 10–28 August, more than twenty messages altering troop lists 

General Schwarzkopf
5

on the original deployment order 

passed between Central Command 

and the Pentagon, reflecting the

complexity of identifying specific

units based on requirement, availability, and component.

Operation Desert Shield was a 

major test for Army logistics. The 

Army component (ARCENT—

U.S. Army Central Command) 

commander, Lt. Gen. John J. 

Yeosock, arrived in Saudi Arabia 

on 6 August to oversee the massive effort. With a handful of 

staff officers, he set up an interim

headquarters in the Saudi capital 

of Riyadh to supervise the arrival, 

sustainment, and overall planning 

for deploying Army units. Until 

General Schwarzkopf arrived in 

the theater on 25 August, General Yeosock also helped CENTCOM’s 

acting deputy commander in chief, Lt. Gen. Charles A. Homer, U.S. Air 

Force, coordinate the arrival of the joint force. Yeosock knew the terrain 

and climate and was familiar with his Saudi hosts. From 1981 to 1983, 

he had served in Riyadh as project manager for the modernization of 

the Saudi Arabian National Guard, and this experience would serve him 

well in the months ahead.

The First Deployments

The first units of the XVIII Airborne Corps began deploying to Saudi

Arabia on 8 August. The rapid deployment of the ready brigade of the 82d 

Airborne Division clearly signaled a U.S. national commitment to deter 

further Iraqi aggression. The brigade took its light antitank weapons and 

M551 Sheridans, armored reconnaissance vehicles that provided some 

antiarmor capability with a 152-mm. main gun and MGM–51 Shillelagh 

antitank missile. The paratroopers would be at considerable risk should 

Iraq decide to invade Saudi Arabia before the United States completed 

its force buildup. Nevertheless, the decision drew “a line in the sand.”

The XVIII Airborne Corps, ordinarily headquartered at Fort Bragg, 

North Carolina, served as the Army’s contingency corps. This mission 

required that it be ready to deploy on demand. Lt. Gen. Gary E. Luck 

General Yeosock
6

had assumed command of the 

corps in July 1990 and was a 

decorated veteran of Vietnam and 

former commander of the Joint 

Special Operations Command. 

Under General Luck’s leadership, the XVIII Airborne Corps 

provided command and control 

to the 101st Airborne Division 

(Air Assault), the 24th Infantry 

Division (Mechanized), and the 

82d Airborne Division. The 101st 

Airborne Division, stationed at Fort 

Campbell, Kentucky, was in effect 

a light infantry division trained to 

deploy and assault by helicopter. 

The 24th Infantry Division, located 

at Fort Stewart, Georgia, served as 

the XVIII Airborne Corps’ heavy 

division. A heavy division such as 

the 24th relied upon the speed, flexibility, mobility, and firepower of its

tracked vehicles: armored personnel carriers, infantry fighting vehicles,

self-propelled artillery, and main battle tanks. The 82d Airborne Division, 

the Army’s premier light contingency force, routinely had one of its 

brigades designated as its ready brigade. This was the first to go to the

Persian Gulf.

The first elements of the 82d’s ready brigade departed Pope Air

Force Base, adjacent to Fort Bragg, early in the afternoon of 8 August 

1990 and arrived at Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, the following day. These 

immediately established defenses around the airfield to provide security

for later-arriving units. As additional troops came into the country, the 

perimeter expanded. By the afternoon of 13 August, when the ready 

brigade reported 100 percent of its troops deployed from Fort Bragg and 

88 percent of them already in Saudi Arabia, it had expanded its area of 

operations to provide security to Al Jubayl, the port through which the 

U.S. Marines would enter the theater.

The other two brigades of the 82d quickly followed the ready brigade. On 13 August, the 1st Brigade deployed an advance party, which 

arrived in Saudi Arabia two days later, and completed its deployment on 

the twentieth. The 3d Brigade began its deployment on 19 August and 

completed it on the twenty-fourth. Around this time, selected elements of 

General Luck
7

the XVIII Airborne Corps Support Command moved into Saudi Arabia 

to begin building the necessary logistical infrastructure.

While establishing defensive positions and conducting patrols, the 

soldiers began the long process of adapting to the environment. Their 

leaders carefully watched water consumption. The soldiers initially 

trained and worked only at night, in the early morning, and in the late 

afternoon to limit exposure to the searing desert sun. The sand made 

its way into everything—weapons, vehicles, clothing, and food—and 

constant attention was required to make sure equipment and weapons 

would work when they were needed. Although the corps’ personnel 

flew to Saudi Arabia, most of their heavier equipment moved by ship.

The transshipment of materiel continued through August and September 

from five Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico ports. Corps support units loaded

at Wilmington, North Carolina.

Other Army units with more specialized, yet critical missions quickly 

followed the 82d into Saudi Arabia. Special Forces planners who accompanied the 82d Airborne Division began preparing for the arrival of the 5th 

Special Forces Group (Airborne). In addition, the lead elements of the 7th 

Transportation Group from Fort Eustis, Virginia, started their movement 

to the ports. That unit would control port operations and the unloading of 

equipment from ships once they docked in Saudi Arabia. On 14 August, 

the commander of the 11th Signal Brigade arrived in theater and began 

establishing an Army communications network. The first elements of

Troops of the 82d Airborne Division loading onto a C5B Galaxy 

Transport at Green Ramp, Pope Air Force Base, North Carolina
8

a Patriot missile battery of the 11th Air Defense Artillery Brigade also 

deployed in early August, and another battery from the 7th Air Defense 

Artillery Regiment arrived in Saudi Arabia on 16 August. The following day, the first aviation elements of the 101st Airborne Division and

advance elements of the 24th Infantry Division arrived in theater. By the 

end of the first week of Desert Shield, more than 4,000 Army soldiers 

had deployed to Saudi Arabia on 106 aircraft. Major weapon systems 

accompanying the soldiers included 15 AH–64 Apache helicopters, 8 

OH–58 Kiowa observation helicopters, 18 M551 Sheridan light tanks, 

56 tube-launched optically tracked wire-guided (TOW) antitank missile 

systems, 2 multiple-launch rocket system (MLRS) launchers, and 12 

105-mm. towed howitzers.

Although the Desert Shield forces continued to deploy at a steady 

pace, General Schwarzkopf needed more firepower. In the early weeks

of the deployment, he anxiously awaited the arrival of the 24th Infantry 

Division (Mechanized) with its 216 M1A1 Abrams tanks. Despite the 

rapid movement of the Army’s first combat unitsinto Saudi Arabia, time

and the initiative remained with Iraq. Saddam Hussein had six divisions 

available in Kuwait to launch into Saudi Arabia with no warning if he 

so chose.

Support of the Deployed Forces

The flow of the XVIII Airborne Corps’ combat forcesinto Southwest

Asia somewhat overshadowed the deployment of combat service support 

forces. General Luck understood the need for an adequate support structure, an imperative considerably magnified by the austere environment of

Southwest Asia. Army divisions did have organic logistical organizations 

capable of supporting them for limited periods. When their defensive 

positions were near the ports, combat units could use organic capabilities to transport supplies to and process them in locations in the field.

Eventually, however, the distance and sheer volume would overwhelm 

their ability to process, move, store, maintain, and account for materiel. 

Such operations also would detract from their primary defensive mission. For sustained operations and a stay of over thirty days, the Army 

Central Command needed a mature logistical system. However, the 

countervailing need to forestall possible surprise attacks by the Iraqis 

drove priorities and taxed the system. The XVIII Corps reported on the 

third day of its deployment, “The combination of moving combat forces 

as rapidly as possible as well as essential service support from the Corps 

has generated requirements which exceed limited resources immediately 

available to the corps.”
9

As General Yeosock and the ARCENT staff had rehearsed in the 

Command Post Exercise Internal Look 90, they planned on initially 

deploying only a minimum of essential support units and creating a 

limited logistical base. Priority of deployment would go to combat forces. 

Only later and if necessary would a mature logistics infrastructure be 

developed. Hence, when XVIII Airborne Corps units arrived in theater, 

logistical support was virtually nonexistent. The corps support units 

that were arriving quickly discovered they could not effectively handle 

the massive deployment of combat troops, who needed the full range 

of support: food, shelter, equipment, supplies, sanitation facilities, and 

transportation. General Yeosock realized the need to expand the support 

system rapidly.

Maj. Gen. William G. Pagonis, whom General Yeosock appointed as 

ARCENT’s deputy commander for logistics, led the logistical buildup. 

Pagonis landed in Riyadh on 8 August, scant hours before the first

transport carrying the ready brigade of the 82d Airborne Division hit 

the tarmac at Dhahran, two hundred fifty miles away. While en route to

Saudi Arabia, Pagonis and hissmallstaff (initially just four officers, later

expanded to twenty-two) drafted a logistics plan for the theater. All had 

participated in the Cold War’s Return of Forces to Germany (Reforger) 

exercises, which provided a model for their Desert Shield plan. The 

group outlined three major tasks necessary to create a sound logistics 

system in theater: the reception, onward movement, and sustainment of 

soldiers, equipment, and supplies.

When Pagonis arrived at Dhahran, he was appalled at what he found. 

Combat troop arrivals had quickly overwhelmed the local resources. 

Lt. Col. James Ireland on Pagonis’ staff later recalled that as soldiers 

poured in, “we just didn’t have anything. We had . . . soldiers here with 

no place to put them, no way to get them out there if we did have a place 

to put them, and difficulty feeding them.” Soldiers slept on the sand

and on handball and tennis courts. Hundreds slept on the ground behind 

the quarters occupied by the U.S. Military Training Mission to Saudi 

Arabia and dug slit trenches for latrines. Three American officers from

the training mission frantically tried to process the incoming soldiers 

from the XVIII Airborne Corps, who had started to arrive late in the 

morning of 9 August. The training mission had no significant transportation resources of its own, so the officers arranged for Saudi buses and

trucks to take the troops to a vacated air-defense facility fifteen miles

from the airport. With no personnel, no facilities, no resources, and 

very little information, those three officers made the best of a bad situation and provided whatever support they could; but the overwhelming 
10

demands quickly took a physical 

toll. His staff officers “looked like

zombies,” Pagonis later recalled. 

“They hadn’t slept for . . . days.” 

On 11 August, the arrival of 

the 7th Transportation Group 

improved the situation, and soon 

a handful of active-duty soldiers 

and recalled reservists created an 

ad hoc logistical structure.

Pre-positioned stocks of equipment aboard ships stabilized most 

of the immediate crises in supplying 

and sustaining the new arrivals. Four 

ships that had been anchored off 

the coast of Diego Garcia brought 

rations, cots, tents, blankets, and 

medical supplies, as well as refrigerated trailers, reverse-osmosis 

water-purification units, forklifts, and tactical petroleum terminals. Those

ships, which had been stocked and positioned so they could support an 

expeditionary force such as the one now deploying, arrived at Saudi Arabian 

ports on 17 August. They bought time for Pagonis to stand up a more formal 

logistics system. “There was no doubt about it,” Pagonis later said. “We 

would have never made it if we did not have those four Army pre-po ships.”

By the end of August, General Pagonis’ staff, now configured as

a Provisional Support Command, was gaining control of the situation. 

They built the logistics infrastructure while simultaneously receiving 

and moving troops. Within fifteen days after assuming responsibility

for the airport at Dhahran, they had processed over forty thousand 

soldiers, formed an area support group and an area support battalion, 

and started unloading ships. By the end of September, the Provisional 

Support Command had moved over one hundred thousand people and 

discharged thirty-nine ships. In addition to serving its own elements, 

Pagonis’ command supported the other Central Command component 

services—Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps—once they were ashore 

in theater. The Army had executive agency for food, water, bulk fuel, 

ground munitions, port operations, inland cargo transportation, construction support, veterinary services, and graves registration for all U.S. 

forces, either providing the support directly or arranging for it through 

contracting or host-nation support.

General Pagonis
11

Host-Nation Support and Contracting

Satisfying as many supply requirements as possible from local 

sources promised to ease logistical shortfalls and reduce the number 

of American support units ultimately deployed to the theater. Thus, 

Provisional Support Command staffers quickly surveyed as many local 

contractors in the region as possible and within a few short weeks 

had established the basis for an indigenous assistance and contracting 

program. Such measures became critical components of the overall 

logistical effort. Saudi Arabia was not a backward, primitive state. 

Soaring oil revenues in the 1970s had enabled the kingdom to make major 

investments in public works. The port of Ad Dammam was one of the 

best in the world. It and Al Jubayl had modern facilities, with immense 

capacities and staging areas. Airports, particularly at Dhahran, were 

large and modern, and the primary road system was well built—although 

inadequate for the high volume and heavy vehicles that a large military 

force would generate. The construction boom of the 1970s presented 

potential solutions to some of the problems involved in supporting the 

U.S. force. Huge public housing projects, designed initially for a growing 

population of expatriate workers and citizens migrating into the cities, 

stood largely unoccupied.

The U.S. Army quickly moved to create formal agreements for the 

use of resources available in Saudi Arabia. Some, such as housing and 

mess facilities near the ports of entry, proved critical to logistical success. Host-nation support included assistance to coalition forces and to 

other organizations located in a host nation’s territory. An agreement for 

peacetime and wartime help had long been in force between the United 

States and the Federal Republic of Germany, where the United States 

had thousands of soldiers; but none covered the American presence in 

Saudi Arabia until August 1990.

Because of the fluid situation in August, contracting for host-nation

support was conducted in a decentralized and informal manner. Initially, 

there were no controls and people at all levels did their own contracting. Efforts to find billeting and to move troops from Dhahran reflected

the unstructured nature of contracting activities in August and early 

September. In one case, the acting support command headquarters commandant heard about empty Saudi housing nearby. Desperate for more 

space, he dropped what he was doing, drove to the site, decided that 

the price was reasonable, and said he would take it. In another case, an 

officer was forced to cruise the streets of Dhahran looking for idle buses

or trucks to contract for imminently arriving troops. Whenever he saw a 

group of vehicles, he tried to negotiate a deal: there was no time for the 
12

formal contracting process. “We were,” he said, “literally out contracting 

for the buses while they [U.S. troops] were landing at the airport.” He 

gave one Saudi entrepreneur a bag with $40,000 in cash, got a receipt, 

and waited for his trucks and buses. To his immense relief, the vehicles 

arrived as promised and the soldiers moved off the airfield.

The Saudi Arabian government made it clear from the start that 

it would shoulder many of the expenses of the deployment. As early 

as 18 August, the logistics operations center developed a list of the 

command’s basic needs for host-nation support for the next forty-five

days. The Saudis reacted energetically and cooperatively, providing 

tents, food, transportation, real estate, and civilian labor support. On 

10 September, King Fahd verbally committed his nation to provide 

comprehensive support, although the details remained unclear until 

mid-October, when the Department of Defense sent a negotiating team 

to Saudi Arabia. Instead of concluding a contract or international agreement with the Saudis, the team reached an understanding that became a 

de facto agreement. That was done to prevent bureaucratic delays and to 

make “gifts” from Saudi Arabia to the United States as easy as possible 

while accommodating the kingdom’s continuing desire to avoid formal 

ties. Saudi Arabia agreed to pay the costs of all contracts entered into 

by U.S. forces as of 30 October 1990 and backed up its promise with 

a check for $760 million that a nervous American officer personally

carried back to New York for deposit. Saudi Arabia agreed to pay for 

all freshly prepared meals (known as Class A meals, or A-rations, in the 

Army), water, fuel, transportation within Saudi Arabia, and facilities 

including construction. By December, that assistance was valued at 

about $2.5 billion projected over one year.

Transportation

In time, the system of Saudi support and contracting matured and 

helped sustain American forces in theater; but the need to move the 

troops and their equipment from the ports still presented tremendous 

challenges. Both sat waiting for transportation, as it became apparent 

that unloading equipment at the ports was easier than delivering it to 

cantonments. The port of Ad Dammam, which before the crisis averaged 

only six ships a week, handled that many every day after the crisis began. 

Ground transportation provided the key link between the ports and the 

assembly areas. (Map 2)

Many of the improved roads in Saudi Arabia became main supply 

routes for the U.S. Army. The Army used two routes north from Dhahran 

to prepare for and execute the war. The northern route had two segments. 
13

The first, designated Main Supply Route (MSR) Audi, was a very good 

multilane road running from Dhahran, along the coast to just north of Al 

Jubayl. The second, MSR Dodge, was a paved two-lane road running generally northwest from Audi to Hafar al Batin and then onward to Rafha. 

Old hands also called Dodge the Tapline Road, because it paralleled the 

Trans-Arabian Pipeline. Vehicular codenames seemed appropriate for 

roads that ran through or near some of the largest oil fields in the world.

The southern route also consisted of two main supply routes. An 

excellent multilane road running between Dhahran and Riyadh was 

named Toyota. The last segment, Sultan or Nash, ran north from 

Riyadh to Hafar al Batin, where it intersected with Dodge. Sultan was 

a multilane road for about one-third of the distance north from Riyadh 

before narrowing to two lanes. Some of these roads were well surfaced 

and in good repair, but there were not enough of them for the high volume 

of traffic. The distances were great. It was 334 milesfrom Dhahran to the

theater logistical base at King Khalid Military City near Hafar al Batin 

along the northern main supply route and 528 miles via Riyadh. The 

XVIII Airborne Corps’ forward tactical assembly area was over 500 miles 

from Ad Dammam by the northern route and 696 miles by the southern 

road. The highways thus became high-speed avenues for combat units 

and supplies moving to their destinations. Because large stretches were 

multilane roads, they allowed heavy volumes of traffic, both individual

vehicles and convoys, to move quickly. Even those roads that were not 

multilane were paved and in generally good condition. To increase the 

efficiency of the road network, General Pagonis established a series of

convoy support centers. These truck stops operated twenty-four hours a 

day and had fuel, latrines, food, sleeping tents, and limited repair facilities. They added to the comfort, safety, and morale of allies traveling 

in the theater and greatly enhanced the capability of the transporters. 

Because of the long distances, the primitive rest areas quickly became 

favorite landmarks to those who drove the main supply routes.

With excellent ports and durable roads, all the Army needed was the 

means to move equipment and supplies. The oil industry had traditionally needed large vehicles to transport heavy equipment to various well 

sites, so there were heavy equipment transporters and tractor-trailer 

cargo trucks in the country. The growing wealth of the kingdom, with an 

increasing urban population and an expanding pool of expatriate workers, 

meant a large fleet of buses. Likewise, expanding interaction with the

West had prepared the business community to deal with Americans and 

had provided a relatively sophisticated core of bureaucrats and decision 

makers to deal with the demands placed on their economy.
CHARLIE

ECHO

DELTA

ALPHA

BRAVO

M S R SU L TA N

M S R SU L T A N

M S R D O D G E

Wādī al Bāt ̧in

H ̧ afar al Bāţin

King Khalid Military City

Al Arţāwīyah

Al A

Al Jahrah

Rafh ̧ā

RIYADH

Buraydah

Qiba

S A U D I A R A B I A

I R A Q

K U W A I T

Map 2
BASTOGNE

M S R T O Y O T A

M S R A U D I

M S R M E R C EDES

G u l f

 o f

 B a h r a i n

P

E

R

S

I

A

N

G

U

L

F

KUWAIT

Ah ̨madī

Ra’s al Khaī

Al Jubayl

Ad Dammām

Dhahran

Al Hufūf

MANAMA

DOHA

An Nu’ayrīyah

Al Wafrah

Al Mish’āb

I R A N

Q A T A R

B A H R A I N

December 1990

Unit positions approximate

SUPPLYING THE TROOPS

Logbase

MSR Main Supply Route

Miles

0 50 100

E L E V A T I O N I N F E E T

0 1000 2000 3000 and Above
16

Despite the confusion engendered by the rapid buildup, Army Central 

Command could point to great progress during the first month in Saudi

Arabia. By early September, the entire 82d Airborne Division and the 

first elements of the 24th Infantry Division had arrived. The rest of the

24th and the 101st Airborne Division were on the way. The partnership 

with the Saudi government was evolving as well, and a logistical support 

organization was emerging. The shield was rapidly falling into place.

The mission of Desert Shield was to defend Saudi Arabia with 

whatever forces were on hand while a buildup of additional forces was 

occurring. Success relied in part on presenting the Iraqis the illusion of 

facing a more formidable force than the United States was initially able 

to bring into the country. Had the Iraqis attacked in force before the 

defenses were in place, the results could have been catastrophic. Once 

Desert Shield was set, the result was far from certain; but had the Iraqis 

attacked, their armored units would have faced a formidable defense 

in depth. Outlying security elements would have called in waves of air 

and aviation counterstrikes while retiring upon heavier forces to their 

rear. Soon, the Iraqi attack would have driven into heavy and precisely 

surveyed artillery fires and then it would have encountered the deadly

accuracy of Abrams tanks and TOW missiles mounted on M3 Bradley 

fighting vehicles. American direct-fire weapons had double the effective

Tapline Road
17

range of their Iraqi counterparts. Under pressure, American defenders 

would have had sufficient advantages in range to safely withdraw to

subsequent firing positions. Iraqi losses would have been appalling well

before they had the opportunity to engage in effective combat themselves. 

This grim pattern would have repeated itself for the entire two hundred 

kilometers the Iraqis would have had to attack through to reach targets 

of strategic significance. Even had an Iraqi force managed to sustain

such an attack, its casualty rates would have been catastrophic. To the 

relief of all the forces in the coalition, such a large-scale Iraqi attack was 

never launched.

By mid-September, in concert with coalition forces, the XVIII 

Airborne Corps was capable of defending Saudi Arabia from the battlehardened Iraqi Army. By early November, the political objectives of the 

United States and its allies had changed, however. Frustrated in efforts 

to achieve a diplomatic solution to the crisis, a worldwide coalition 

reinforced by United Nations mandates determined not to allow Saddam 

Hussein to enjoy the fruits of his aggression. President Bush committed 

the United States to the liberation of Kuwait and not just to the defense 

of Saudi Arabia. This objective would require offensive action, and 

forces deployed to Saudi Arabia did not have sufficient mass to succeed

in such an offensive with minimum losses. On 9 November, President 

Bush announced that he would send another corps to Saudi Arabia, the 

U.S. Army VII Corps out of Europe, as proof of his determination that 

the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait would be reversed by force if necessary.

The bulk of the reinforcements needed for the ground operations 

of Operation Desert Storm came from Germany. The units selected to 

deploy from Germany included the VII Corps headquarters in Stuttgart; 

the 1st Armored Division in Ansbach; the 3d Brigade, 2d Armored 

Division (Forward), in Garlstedt; the 3d Armored Division in Frankfurt; 

the 2d Armored Cavalry Regiment in Nuremberg; the 11th Aviation 

Brigade in Illesheim; and the 2d Corps Support Command in Stuttgart. In 

addition, the 1st Division at Fort Riley, Kansas, also received deployment 

orders. The decision would raise the level of U.S. ground forces in the 

Persian Gulf region to over four hundred thousand.

“Deforger 90”

Discussions of the possible use of units based in Europe for Desert

Shield dated from early August, when Department of the Army planners 

had asked for the deployment of CS and CSS units from Germany to 

Saudi Arabia. With the precedent for deployment of American forces 

from duty with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) already 
18

established, the Army could consider using not only its I and III Corps 

from the United States but also its V and VII Corps from Germany. 

Deployment from Europe offered numerous advantages. The corps were 

nearer to the theater of operations and had greater combat power based 

on the readiness, size, and possession of the most modern equipment 

in the Army’s inventory, such as the M1A1 Abrams tank, the M2/M3 

Bradley fighting vehicle, and the AH–64 Apache attack helicopter. In

addition, the deployment afforded Chief of Staff of the Army General 

Carl E. Vuono the opportunity to accelerate the ongoing reduction of 

American forces in Europe.

The move from Europe did present problems. A forward-deployed 

corps had never carried out a deployment of the kind and magnitude 

contemplated. Furthermore, the VII Corps was neither structured for nor 

assigned a role in major out-of-theater contingencies. By deployment standards set by troops based in the United States, the movement from Germany 

would be unique. Unlike other transfers, in which units tended to be located 

on a single installation, United States Army, Europe (USAREUR), units 

came from multiple posts and numerous small communities. Such dispersion complicated relocation. Dependent on host-nation support and fixed

facilities for logistics, the corps had responsibility for a network of military 

communities across southern Germany supporting more than ninety-two 

thousand soldiers and their families. Any deployment involved major 

challenges. The deploying corps would have to leave behind adequate 

means to take care of families and communities. They also had to move 

the soldiers and equipment to the Middle East as quickly as possible, nevertheless allowing them adequate time to assemble at arrival ports, collect 

equipment, deploy into the tactical assembly areas, equip and organize for 

combat operations, and prepare and train for battle.

While the U.S. Army, Europe, prepared for deployment, ongoing 

developments affected the troops in Germany. General Crosby E. Saint, 

then the USAREUR commander in chief, and his staff were planning to 

close about one hundred installations as the Army drew down to post–Cold 

War levels. They would need to return facilities and other properties to 

the German government and to restructure the residual force into a single 

combat-ready corps able to operate under NATO agreements. Accordingly, 

about twenty-one battalions were preparing to stand down, to turn in their 

equipment and property, and to return to the United States as a result of an 

arms-reduction agreement between NATO and Warsaw Pact nations. In 

September 1990, the Department of Defense had announced the first units

scheduled to leave Europe. Some of those departures were set for as early 

as 1 March 1991 and others for 1 May. In anticipation of the reductions, 
19

USAREUR already had plans to withdraw the remaining contingents. 

Considerations for selecting units for deployment included plans for 

withdrawing selected units as well as capabilities, recent training, and the 

status of equipment modernization.

The unit most affected by the changed plans for the Gulf was the VII 

Corps commanded by Lt. Gen. Frederick M. Franks Jr. General Franks 

convened a small planning cell to determine the final force package

and to begin deployment planning. USAREUR and VII Corps planners 

eventually settled on a force package with an atypical corps structure. 

They developed a heavy corps organized around two heavy divisions 

from V and VII Corps and other theater assets, which provided the types 

of units lacking in the XVIII Airborne Corps. In particular, the inclusion 

of the 3d Armored Division, a V Corps unit with M1A1 Abrams tanks 

in its inventory, provided more armor than currently existed in other 

VII Corps units. Its deployment rather than the VII Corps’ 3d Infantry 

Division (Mechanized) also left an infantry unit in the Würzburg area 

so that southern Germany was not stripped totally of combat troops.

On 9 November, the day after a speech by President Bush outlining 

the new goal of liberating Kuwait, General Franks held a commanders’ 

conference to give training guidance to the deploying units as well as to 

begin planning for the base organization that would stay behind. The day 

after the conference, key VII Corps commanders departed for a reconnaissance trip to Saudi Arabia. Franks went to the Persian Gulf a few 

days later to talk with Schwarzkopf. At a 13 November strategy meeting 

of the CENTCOM staff, Schwarzkopf told Franks that his mission in 

the forthcoming offensive would be to attack the elite Iraqi Republican 

Guard and neutralize it as a combat-effective force.

To accomplish the move in a timely fashion, the ARCENT staff 

suggested that the VII Corps adopt the following movement sequence:

Tactical advance party

CS and CSS units

2d ACR

7th Engineer Brigade

Additional CS and CSS units

1st Armored Division

11th Aviation Brigade

VII Corps Headquarters and Headquarters Company

VII Corps Artillery

2d Armored Division (Forward)

3d Armored Division, V Corps
20

In the only change made to the recommended priority list, General 

Saint decided to move the 2d ACR up on the list and send it to Saudi 

Arabia first. The regiment, a self-contained unit, could deploy immediately to set up assembly areas and prepare to receive the rest of the corps.

With the movement sequence in place, USAREUR and VII Corps 

planners arranged for the move. Preparing for the large operation was not 

a new experience for the U.S. Army, Europe. Beginning in 1967, soldiers 

from combat divisions in the United States had flown into European

airports for twenty-one Reforger exercises conducted in response to a 

notional threat of a Warsaw Pact attack against NATO forces in what 

was then West Germany. Subsequently, they picked up unit equipment 

that had been shipped into the Antwerp, Rotterdam, and Bremerhaven 

seaports, as well as pre-positioned organizational materiel configured to

unit sets, or POMCUS, that had been stored in Europe. For deployment 

to Southwest Asia, the process would be reversed with some changes. 

Yet, the similarity to Reforger exercises was so apparent that soldiers 

and allies dubbed the movement Deforger 90.

In about seven weeks, U.S. Army, Europe, moved more than 

one hundred twenty-two thousand soldiers and civilians and fifty

thousand five hundred pieces of heavy equipment from Germany

to Saudi Arabia. The tight schedule, coupled with unpredictable 

German winter weather, made it essential to use all available modes of 

transportation. Thousands of tracked and wheeled vehicles, hundreds 

of aircraft, and tons of equipment and supplies deployed in virtually 

every way possible—421 barge loads from the primary loading sites 

at Mannheim and Aschaffenburg; 407 trains with 12,210 railcars; 

and 204 road convoys totaling 5,100 vehicles. In a deliberate effort 

to reduce the burden of increased traffic on the autobahns and to 

expedite the move, the large majority of vehicles, both tracked and 

wheeled, traveled by rail or barge.

Once at the three ports, the equipment was assembled in staging areas 

and subsequently sent in 154 shiploadsto Saudi Arabia. The soldiers flew

out of Ramstein, Rhein Main, Nuremberg, and Stuttgart. It took 1,772 

buses to move the troops to the airports, 1,008 vehicles and drivers from 

the 37th Transportation Group to carry the baggage, and 578 aircraft to 

fly them all to Southwest Asia. As the VII Corps neared completion of

the process, Lt. Gen. William S. Flynn, commander of the 21st Theater 

Army Area Command, noted how much more complex the move was than 

Reforger had been. “We usually plan all year long to unload two or three 

ships in one port,” he said. “For Desert Shield we planned for a week 

and loaded some 115 ships through three ports and moved more than a 
21

corps worth of equipment through 

the lines of communication.”

Movement of the materiel from 

posts in Germany would not have 

been possible without the help 

of the German government. For 

example, shipping ammunition 

to Saudi Arabia became a theater 

team effort with handling units 

from the Bundeswehr and the 

Bundesbahn helping USAREUR 

personnel. American soldiers and 

German workers loaded munitions 

onto 1,276 trucks and 2,300 railcars 

at four railheads and three ports. 

During the peak of this operation, 

more tons of ammunition were 

moved in one day than the theater 

normally shipped in one year.

While waiting their turn to 

leave, the heavy divisions continued training and readied their equipment 

and themselves for war. The VII Corps units, collectively considering 

themselves to be the U.S. Army’s most flexible corps, readjusted their

training to concentrate on a more active defense and on offensive 

operations. Tankers and Bradley crewmen fired crew-level gunnery at

the Seventh Army Training Center at Grafenwöhr; maneuvered at the 

Hohenfels Combat Maneuver Training Center; trained on computer 

simulators at their home bases; and drilled extensively with chemical 

protection equipment.

Many soldiers learned to work with new faces. Because of the force 

reductions in Europe and other factors, Army planners and commanders 

assembled complete divisions using battalions and brigades borrowed 

from other divisions and support components that consisted in part of 

Reserve and National Guard units from the United States and Germany. 

Corps-level combat support and combat service support organizations 

also mixed regular and reserve units under a single headquarters. For 

example, military police from three regular brigades and two reserve 

battalions deployed under the VII Corps’ 14th Military Police Brigade 

headquarters. The 2d Corps Support Command swelled from its peacetime strength of nearly eight thousand to twenty-five thousand through

reserve augmentation.

General Franks
22

The 2d Armored Cavalry Regiment deployed to Southwest Asia first.

Within days of President Bush’s 8 November announcement, the regiment, 

which had patrolled West Germany’s border with the East for more than 

forty-five years, had its equipment loaded and was under way. Afterreaching Saudi Arabia in early December, it began preparations for the arrival 

of the remaining VII Corps units at the designated tactical assembly areas.

The deployments from Germany demonstrated that rapidly dispatching forward-deployed units into another theater as a contingency 

force was a major challenge. With no formal doctrine for such massive 

intertheater movements and hampered by bad weather, dock strikes, 

and the problems inherent with loading hundreds of tanks and wheeled 

vehicles onto railcars and ships, the remaining VII Corps units moved 

less quickly than the 2d ACR. Although all corps equipment reached 

the European ports of debarkation on time for transshipment, ships did 

not put all of the VII Corps in Southwest Asia by the target date of 15 

January. By that time, 91 percent of the corps’ soldiers, with 67 percent of 

the tracked vehicles and 66 percent of the wheeled vehicles, had arrived 

in the theater of operations.

Once in the theater of operations, the distribution of unit equipment delayed movement to the tactical assembly areas in the desert. 

VII Corps assembly area in Saudi Arabia
23

Commanders had hoped to deploy 

in tactical formations, but the 

equipment of individual units frequently became dispersed among 

a number of ships. Equipment did 

not arrive in unit sets, complicating 

the buildup at the Saudi ports and 

delaying the VII Corps’ forward 

movement. Lack of coordination 

between sea and air traffic had 

major effects on port overcrowding, preparations for combat, and 

force protection. For example, on 

9 January, over thirty-five thousand

VII Corps soldiers were in staging 

areas at Saudi ports waiting for 

their equipment or for ground 

transportation to move to the field.

Soldiers flew into airports near

Al Jubayl and Ad Dammam. From 

there, they moved to the seaports, 

where they stayed in warehouses or 

tent cities and waited for their equipment. Once their equipment arrived, 

the soldiers oversaw the loading of their tanks, artillery, and other tracked 

vehicles onto heavy equipment transporters. Buses carried the officers,

soldiers, and baggage.Between the arrival of the firstship, on 5 December

1990, and 18 February 1991, when the last equipment departed the Saudi 

ports for the VII Corps’ tactical assembly areas, the corps launched 900 

convoys; moved over 6,000 armored vehicles and thousands of other 

pieces of equipment over 340 miles into the desert; and sent forward 

3,500 containers with critical unit equipment, repair parts, and supplies. 

By mid-February, a massive armored force was fully in place in Saudi 

Arabia ready to provide a “mailed fist”—the description used by VII

Corps Commander General Franks—for the coalition ground offensive.

Mobilizing the Reserve Components

There was no question that the reserve components would play a key 

role in the imminent conflict. The all-volunteer force depended heavily

on the Army Reserve and Army National Guard for any sustained combat 

operations. More than one thousand forty reserve and guard units, totaling 

about one hundred forty thousand soldiers from every state and territory, 

MOPP Medics in the Desert

by Gene Snyder
24

supported the Persian Gulf operation. Key elements of combat support 

and combat service support had been placed in the reserve components 

in the preceding decades to save money and manpower. The active 

component units could not go to war without them, and thousands of 

reservists flowed to the Gulf in September and October. During the

November deployments, even more Reserve and Guard units were 

committed to Saudi Arabia. After President Bush’s 8 November order 

to increase troop levels in Southwest Asia, Secretary Cheney not only 

announced the deployment of the VII Corps and the 1st Division but also 

the federalization of three combat “roundout” brigades that were to be the 

third combat brigade of several active duty divisions—the 48th Infantry 

Brigade from Georgia, the 155th Armored Brigade from Mississippi, 

and the 256th Infantry Brigade (Mechanized) from Louisiana—and two 

field artillery brigades—the 142d from Arkansas and Oklahoma and the

196th from Tennessee, Kentucky, and West Virginia.

Not called up in great numbers for the Vietnam War, the Army’s 

reserve component structure, like the active component, was rejuvenated 

in the late seventies and early eighties. Many senior leaders of the Army 

Reserve and National Guard felt they were now prepared to take their part 

in active ground combat. While the flow of combat support and combat

service support assets from the reserves went relatively smoothly, as did 

their performance in theater, the callup of Reserve and National Guard 

combat units brought unique training issues of combat preparedness to 

the forefront. CS and CSS units require considerably less collective and 

far less maneuver training than combat units. War plans for Europe had 

envisioned some National Guard combat brigades asroundout units filling

out active component divisions. These were scheduled for mobilization 

and movement to theater to fightside by side with their active component

counterparts; but their required “days to train” were notably different. 

The thirty days of training available to them per year did not, of course, 

compare with full-time service. For almost twenty years, these selected 

National Guard units had trained for deployment to Europe to fight as

roundouts; and their leadership believed they would be ready within the 

timelines envisioned. Since European scenarios envisioned escalating 

“roads to war” lasting months, general deployment plans (GDP) made 

allowance for National Guard days to train. Desert Storm requirements 

for National Guard combat brigades emerged suddenly. The Army leadership created an extensive training regimen for the selected brigades to 

“certify” them in lieu of the days to train envisioned by the GDP.

On 15 November, three National Guard ground combat brigades 

received official alert notices to prepare for mobilization. Fifteen days
25

later, the approximately forty-two hundred officers and men of the 48th

and fifty-five hundred soldiers of the 256th reported to active duty; the

thirty-seven hundred men of the 155th reported on 7 December. The 

delay in the 155th’s callup provided the local commanders at Fort Hood 

and the National Training Center (NTC) at Fort Irwin some flexibility in

scheduling training. Army planners estimated at that time that it would 

cost about $120 million to activate all three units.

Predeployment training followed callup. Once alerted, each brigade 

had thirty days to report to a mobilization station and used that time to 

assess training, to prepare leaders, to hone individual and small-unit 

skills, and to conduct basic maintenance and logistics training. Once 

at the mobilization stations, the reservists were to prepare for overseas 

movement and undergo more individual and crew training. Finally, each 

brigade wasto separately attend the Army’s unique recertification training

course at the National Training Center.

Upon federalization, soldiers of the 48th Infantry Brigade gathered 

at Fort Stewart, Georgia, their mobilization station, by 5 December. 

Between 5 and 8 December, they prepared for overseas movement. Like 

the regular units, they underwent physical, psychological, and dental 

evaluations; received new dogtags and identification cards, if necessary;

and completed wills and financial forms. While at Fort Stewart, the

soldiers also worked on common training tasks, generally referred to as 

basic survivability skills, such as weapons qualification, tank systems

familiarization, and chemical-warfare training.

On 17 December, the soldiers began loading their equipment onto 

railroad cars for the cross-country trip to the National Training Center. 

Personnel movement by air to Fort Irwin began ten days later. The final

flight of soldiers arrived in California on 3 January. Movement into the

desert training area commenced the following day.

The arrival of the 48th Infantry Brigade posed a major challenge to 

Brig. Gen. Wesley K. Clark, commander of the National Training Center. 

Previously, the mission of the desert exercise post was to rigorously test 

and evaluate the performance of active Army armor and mechanized 

battalions that rotated through the center every thirty days or so. Now 

Clark had to address the training needs of an entire brigade; determine 

its ability to accomplish what the Army termed its mission essential task 

list, or METL; and then use his NTC cadre to train the components of the 

48th to fully meet its required standards in each mission area. Ultimately, 

the job took fifty-five days, on par with the GDP expectations of the Cold

War, and included squad-, platoon-, and company-level training in both 

live-fire and opposing-force (OPFOR) environments. Training culminated
26

with a twelve-day continuous exercise for the full brigade. On the advice of 

senior Army leaders, Clark designed a training sequence that incorporated 

lessons drawn from the Middle East, such as breaching the obstacles such 

as those Iraq had erected in Kuwait and defending against Iraqi tactics 

used in the eight-year war against Iran. The 48th continued its training 

throughout January and February, completing it on 28 February, the day 

the cease-fire was declared in Iraq and Kuwait. The unit did not deploy

to the Persian Gulf.

The 155th Armored Brigade had a somewhat similar experience. 

While waiting for the 48th to finish at Fort Irwin, the 155th trained at

Fort Hood. Its crews did experience serious difficulties on the gunnery

ranges. The commander of the 155th later acknowledged that training at 

Fort Hood “was an eye opener.” The ranges were up to 1.8 miles wider 

and 2.5 miles deeper than the unit’s normal training range at Camp 

Shelby, Mississippi. After intensive training at Fort Hood, the brigade 

spent three weeks at the National Training Center.

The training of the 256th Infantry Brigade created new rounds of controversy regarding the use of roundout brigades in combat. The brigade 

had received M1 Abrams tanks in 1989 and was still in the new-equipment 

training process when federalized. The soldiers had only recently learned 

to drive the tanks; and maneuver, gunnery, and maintenance training 

had not yet been scheduled. In addition, the 256th, like the 155th, had 

arrived at its mobilization station, Fort Polk, Louisiana, with insufficient

chemical protection and communications equipment, partially because 

of extensive redistribution of equipment to other National Guard units 

called up earlier. They too did not finish their training in time to deploy

to the Gulf.

The two field artillery brigades, the 142d and the 196th, were federalized about the same time as their armor and infantry counterparts. 

However, both artillery brigades were nearly fully trained in gunnery 

and, unlike the maneuver brigades, the artillery units did not need most 

of the movement and synchronization skills best taught at the National 

Training Center. On 21 November, the 142d Field Artillery Brigade 

and its three subordinate units—the 1st and 2d Battalions, 142d Field 

Artillery, from Arkansas and the 1st Battalion, 158th Field Artillery, from 

Oklahoma—reported to active duty. The brigade arrived at its mobilization station, Fort Sill, Oklahoma, between 23 and 25 November and began 

focusing on “last minute” chemical-warfare and communications skills.

By 15 December, only twenty-four days after federalization, the 142d 

Brigade had its equipment at the Port of Galveston, Texas, awaiting transshipment to Southwest Asia. Consequently, the 142d borrowed equipment 
27

to refresh skills while at Fort Sill. On 16 January, the brigade deployed 

to Saudi Arabia with the 1st and 2d Battalions, 142d Field Artillery, 

leaving three days later and the 1st Battalion, 158th Field Artillery, the 

only MLRS battalion in the reserve component, on 2 February.

On 15 December, the 196th Field Artillery Brigade was federalized 

with three subordinate battalions. On 2 February, it deployed to Saudi 

Arabia with one of its subordinate units, the 1st Battalion, 201st Field 

Artillery, from West Virginia. The two other units—the 1st Battalion, 

623d Field Artillery, from Kentucky and the 1st Battalion, 181st Field 

Artillery, from Tennessee—joined the brigade several days later.

The speed of mobilization and high level of training by both 

mobilized National Guard field artillery brigades were recognized as a

considerable reserve component success. It reinforced the message communicated by hundreds of CS and CSS units that the reserve component 

would serve effectively as part of the total force. The 142d and 196th 

Brigades, the first reserve artillery units to fight in major combat since

the Vietnam War, performed with distinction. The experience of their 

kindred mobilized National Guard combat maneuver brigades would 

encourage a rethinking of Cold War days-to-train paradigms as the Army 

shifted to an expeditionary posture following Desert Storm.

Planning for the Offensive

By early 1991, the Iraqis occupying Kuwait had created a formidablelooking layered defense of their own, with line infantry entrenched 

behind protective barriers along the border and backed up by local mobile 

reserves of regular army tank and mechanized divisions. These local 

reserves were themselves backed up by the operational reserves of the 

heavily mechanized Republican Guard. Of these Iraqi forces, the line 

infantry was considered brittle, the regular army heavy divisions reliable, 

and the Republican Guard formidable. Saddam Hussein had opined he 

could make the cost of liberating Kuwait higher than the coalition would 

be willing to pay. His specific admonition to Americans was “Yours is

a nation that cannot afford to take 10,000 casualties in a single day.”

The most direct avenue of approach for any coalition assault on the 

Iraqi forces in Kuwait would have been an attack into the teeth of Iraqi 

defenses along the Saudi-Kuwaiti border. The avenues available for such 

an attack included northward along the coastal road, from the “elbow” of 

the border northeast along the shortest route directly into Kuwait City, or 

along the Wadi al Batin in the far west of Kuwait. A more indirect approach 

would be an envelopment through Iraq, either close in by punching through 

thinly held defenses immediately west of the Wadi al Batin, or deeper by 
28

turning the Iraqi line altogether at its far west. Both the direct approach and 

the envelopment could be complemented by amphibious landings on the 

Kuwaiti coast and airborne or air-assault landings into the enemy’s rear.

A factor complicating operational deliberations was the varying roles 

that the different allies were willing to play. The United States, Great 

Britain, and France favored attacking Iraq directly. Their Arab allies 

believed the legitimate mission was to liberate Kuwait and were reluctant 

to commit their ground forces to a wider war. Over time, a campaign plan 

emerged that accommodated coalition preferences and borrowed heavily 

from each of the basic operational choices available. Such compromises 

are often necessary to hold together temporary alliances, especially if 

composed of such disparate countries with varying goals.

In the planned offensive, fighting would begin with a multiphased

air campaign to establish preconditions for ground assault. Coalition 

air forces would successively smash Iraqi air defenses, secure air 

supremacy, suppress Iraqi command and control, isolate the Kuwaiti 

Theater of Operations (KTO), and attrit enemy ground forces in the 

path of the proposed offensive. The ground assault would begin with a 

division-size feint up the Wadi al Batin and a supporting attack by the 

marines reinforced with an Army armored brigade through the elbow 

of Kuwait. Arab thrusts equivalent in size to that of the marines would 

Troops training in trenches
29

go in on their left and right. A marine amphibious feint would tie Iraqi 

units into coastal defenses, while an air assault deep into Iraq would 

isolate the KTO from the Iraqi core around Baghdad. The main attack 

would be that of the VII Corps, consisting of five heavy divisions, four

separate field artillery brigades, an armored cavalry regiment, and a

separate aviation brigade. This massive armored thrust would envelop 

the Iraqi line at its far-west end before turning east to annihilate the 

Republican Guard and then sweep across the northern half of Kuwait. 

The four-division XVIII Airborne Corps would ride the VII Corps’ left 

flank and continue to isolate the KTO from the west while assisting in

closing the trap to the east. With the phased arrival of the VII Corps and 

the maturation of the plan of attack, the stage was set for Desert Shield

to become Desert Storm. (Map 3)

Operation Desert Storm

Operation Desert Storm, the liberation of Kuwait, began on 17 

January 1991 with massive air strikes and missile bombardments 

throughout Iraq. The coalition readily achieved air supremacy, and Iraqi 

command and control does in fact seem to have been virtually paralyzed 

by the time the ground war began. Logistical degradation wore unevenly, 

with Iraqi units closest to the border being the most disadvantaged. In 

part, this was because of the greater distances, every kilometer of which 

exposed units and their supply lines to coalition attack. This was also 

because of the lower priority of the line infantry units on the border and 

an absence of stockpiles of supplies in them comparable to those built 

up to support mechanized units to their rear as well as the Republican 

Guard. Overall, the coalition air campaign was a great success; but it did 

far less well against dug-in equipment than against command and control 

nodes and logistical assets. This situation changed radically when ground 

fighting forced theretofore hidden Iraqi equipment into movement. Then

the synergy achieved by employing ground and air assets in concert 

demonstrated itself with devastating effect.

One limit on the operational success of the air campaign was the 

distraction caused by an urgent diversion of air assets to a campaign 

against Iraqi Scud missiles. Although the Iraqis launched only eighty-six 

Scuds, these relatively primitive missiles had an impact well beyond their 

number. Their range enabled them to reach, albeit inaccurately, soft and 

unprepared targets. Indeed, for Americans the bloodiest single incident 

of the war occurred when a Scud missile slammed into a barracks in 

the Dhahran suburb of Al Khobar on 25 February, killing twenty-eight 

and wounding ninety-seven—almost half from a single unit, the Army 
CHARLIE

ECHO

DELTA

ALPHA

BRAVO

M S R S U L T A N

M S R SU L T A N

M S R D O D G E

XVIII ABN CORPS

FAA

VII CORPS

FAA

V I I C O R 

T A A

17 Feb

14 Feb

25 Jan

Wādī al Bāt ̧in

H ̧ afar al Bāţin

King Khalid Military City

Al Arţāwīyah

Al A

Al Jahrah

Rafh ̧ā

RIYADH

Buraydah

Qiba

S A U D I A R A B I A

I R A Q

K U W A I T

Map 3
BASTOGNE

M S R T O Y O T A

M S R AU DI

M S R M E R C EDE S

P S

X V I I I A B N C O R P S

T A A

17 Jan

G u l f

 o f

 B a h r a i n

P

E

R

S

I

A

N

G

U

L

F

KUWAIT

Ah ̨madī

Ra’s al Khaī

Al Jubayl

Ad Dammām

Dhahran

Al Hufūf

MANAMA

DOHA

An Nu’ayrīyah

Al Wafrah

Al Mish’āb

I R A N

Q A T A R

B A H R A I N

January–February 1991

Unit positions approximate

PREPARING FOR THE GROUND WAR

Miles

0 50 100

E L E V A T I O N I N F E E T

0 1000 2000 3000 and Above

Logbase

Main Supply Route

Tactical Assembly Area

Forward Assembly Area

MSR

TAA

FAA
32

Reserve 14th Quartermaster Detachment from Greensburg, Pennsylvania. 

Perhaps as troubling, Scuds launched at Israel in January threatened 

to bring that embattled nation into the war, thus wrecking carefully 

constructed alliances with Arab nations hostile to or suspicious of 

Israel. Patriot air-defense missiles hastily deployed to Saudi Arabia and 

Israel at the time were reported to have destroyed a number of incoming Scuds; but this certainly did not deter the Iraqis from employing 

the missiles. By 24 January, 40 percent of all coalition air sorties were 

directed against the Scuds—as were significant intelligence, electronicwarfare, and special-operations resources. A vast cat-and-mouse game 

developed throughout the western Iraqi desert as American intelligence 

and reconnaissance assets attempted to find Scudsfor fighter-bombersto

engage while Iraqis attempted to fire their mobile missiles quickly and

then scoot out of harm’s way. Planes hunting Scuds were not, of course, 

pursuing other previously agreed-upon targets whose destruction had 

been preconditions for the ground assault.

The Desert Storm ground operational scheme consisted of a demonstration, a feint, three supporting attacks, an economy-of-force measure 

to isolate—guard, if you will—the battlefield, and a main attack that

featured a penetration early on and in itself was an envelopment. The U.S. 

Navy demonstrated with the 5th Marine Expeditionary Brigade (MEB) 

in the Persian Gulf to create the impression that an amphibious assault 

was imminent. Like many, the Iraqis had been exposed to Marine Corps 

publicity concerning its ability to wreak havoc across the shore and had 

believed what they heard. Conscious exposure of the 5th MEB and its 

preparatory activities on Cable News Network (CNN) and through other 

media heightened the Iraqi sense of anxiety, as did the visible presence of 

naval vessels in the Persian Gulf. The Iraqis dug four divisions in along 

their seaward flank specifically for the purpose of defending against

amphibious assault, and as many more divisions were postured in such a 

manner that they might quickly intercede when the marines came across 

the beaches. Instead, once the ground war was well under way, the 5th 

MEB landed behind friendly lines and became an operational reserve 

for the supporting attack.

The 1st Cavalry Division began its ground war by feinting up the 

Wadi al Batin, ultimately drawing the attention of five Iraqi divisions.

After exchanging shots and doing some damage, the 1st Cavalry backed 

out of the wadi and swung west to catch up with the VII Corps and serve 

as its operational reserve.

Demonstrations and feints work best if the deception they are intended to 

promulgate is plausible and one the enemy is inclined to believe. The Iraqis 
33

had reason to be anxious concerning their 200-plus-kilometer coastline, particularly since important supply routes ran along it. They also fully expected 

an attack up the Wadi al Batin, recognizing that the prominent terrain feature 

would facilitate land navigation deep into the heart of their theater. Indeed, 

when the VII Corps did conduct its attack from the west, it came across mile 

after mile of vehicle defensive positions aligned precisely along the azimuth 

described by 240 degrees magnetic—facing in the direction of an attack up 

the Wadi al Batin. Without much effort, the theater deception plan had taken 

20 percent of the Iraqi force structure out of the fight. By the time the Iraqis

realized their mistake and attempted to redeploy, it was too late.

Supporting attacks are often timed to deceive an enemy into reacting 

to them as if they were the main attack. They may draw forces away 

from the main attack and, perhaps even more important, may lead the 

enemy to malposition his reserves. Since a supporting attack involves 

significant resources and some risk, a single supporting attack is

generally preferred. Desert Storm featured three, largely because the 

two divisions of the I Marine Expeditionary Force (I MEF), reinforced 

Patriot missile battery
34

by the M1 tank–equipped Tiger Brigade of the Army’s 2d Armored 

Division and beefed up by additional M1 tanks rotated into their inventory by the Army, had lined up on the most direct approach from the 

elbow of Kuwait into Kuwait City. Suitable but independent missions 

were designed for Arab allies to their left and right. These, the largely 

Saudi and Gulf Coalition Joint Forces Command–East (JFC-E) and 

the largely Egyptian, Syrian, and Saudi Joint Forces Command–North 

(JFC-N), were each assigned the mission of conducting a supporting 

attack as well.

Attack on Khafji

While the VII Corps completed its movement and planning was under 

way for ground combat operations, the Iraqis surprised the coalition forces 

by making a dramatic “lunge” down the coast from Kuwait against Saudi 

and coalition forces near the small town of Khafji in Saudi Arabia. An 

Iraqi mechanized division penetrated coalition lines on 30 January and 

briefly occupied Khafji, some seven miles inside the Saudi border. In

doing so, it lost 80 percent of its strength and was quickly driven back. 

Weakened by the forward screen of security—including marines firing

TOWs from light armored vehicles—and pummeled from the air, the 

Iraqis achieved little, lost much, and were chased back across the border 

by the Saudis in a day and a half. Nevertheless, the unexpected nature 

of the attack led to soul searching as to the nature and timing of the full 

coalition ground offensive.

The 100-hour Ground War

On 24 February, when ground operations started in earnest, coalition forces were poised along a line that stretched from the Persian Gulf 

westward three hundred miles into the desert. The XVIII Airborne Corps, 

under General Luck, held the left, or western, flank and consisted of the

82d Airborne Division, the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), the 

24th Infantry Division (Mechanized), the French 6th Light Armored 

Division, the 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment, and the 12th and 18th 

Aviation Brigades. The VII Corps was deployed to the right of the XVIII 

Airborne Corps and consisted of the 1st Infantry Division (Mechanized), 

the 1st Cavalry Division (Armored), the 1st and 3d Armored Divisions, 

the British 1st Armoured Division, the 2d Armored Cavalry Regiment, 

and the 11th Aviation Brigade. These two corps covered about two-thirds 

of the line occupied by the larger multinational force.

Three commands held the eastern one-third of the front. Joint 

Forces Command–North, made up of formations from Egypt, Syria, 
35

and Saudi Arabia and led by His Royal Highness Lt. Gen. Prince Khalid 

ibn Sultan, held the portion of the line east of the VII Corps. To the 

right of these allied forces stood Lt. Gen. Walter E. Boomer’s I Marine 

Expeditionary Force, which had the 1st (Tiger) Brigade of the Army’s 

2d Armored Division as well as the 1st and 2d Marine Divisions. Joint 

Forces Command–East on the extreme right, or eastern, flank anchored

the line at the Persian Gulf. This organization consisted of units from all 

six member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council. Like Joint Forces 

Command–North, it was under General Khalid’s command.

Day One: 24 February 1991

After thirty-eight days of continuous air attacks on targets in Iraq and 

Kuwait, President Bush directed the U.S. Central Command to proceed 

with the ground offensive. General Schwarzkopf unleashed all-out attacks 

against Iraqi forces very early on 24 February at three points along the 

coalition line. In the far west, the French 6th Light Armored Division and 

the 101st Airborne Division started the massive western envelopment 

with a ground assault to secure the coalition left flank and an air assault

to establish forward support bases deep in Iraqi territory. (Map 4) In the 

approximate center of the coalition line, along the Wadi al Batin, Maj. 

Gen. John H. Tilelli Jr.’s 1st Cavalry Division attacked north into a 

concentration of Iraqi divisions whose commanders remained convinced 

that the coalition would use that and several other wadis as avenues of 

attack. In the east, two Marine divisions, with the Army’s Tiger Brigade 

and coalition forces under Saudi command, attacked north into Kuwait. 

Faced with major attacks from three widely separated points, the Iraqi 

command had to begin its ground defense of Kuwait and the homeland 

by dispersing its combat power and logistical capability.

The attack began from the XVIII Airborne Corps’ sector along the left 

flank. At 0100, Brig. Gen. Bernard Janvier sent scouts from his French

6th Light Armored Division into Iraq on the extreme western end of 

General Luck’s line. Three hours later, the French main body attacked 

during a light rain. Their objective was As Salman, little more than a 

crossroads with an airfield about ninety miles inside Iraq. Reinforced by

the 2d Brigade, 82d Airborne Division, the French crossed the border 

unopposed and raced north into the darkness.

Before the French reached As Salman, they found some very 

surprised outposts of the Iraqi 45th Infantry Division. General Janvier 

immediately sent his missile-armed Gazelle attack helicopters against the 

dug-in enemy tanks and bunkers. Late intelligence reports had assessed 

the 45th as only about 50 percent effective after weeks of intensive 
1 Cav (-) 

X X

1 Br

3

1 X X

X X

3

I I I

1

X X

24

X X

6 FR LT

X X

X X

82 (-)

X

2 82

X X

101

X X X

ROCHAMBEAU

WHITE COBRA

X V I I I A B N C O R P S

V I I C O R P S

TALLIL

Euphrates River

Wādī al Bā

As Salmān

Ash Shabakah

H ̧ afar 

Rafh ̧ā

As Samāwah

S A U D I A R A B I A

I R A Q

Map 4
X

4 EG

X X

1 2

X

9 SY

X X

X

X X

3 EG

X X

1 Mar

X X

2 Mar

X X

20 SA

X

10 SA (-)

X

10 SA X

X

2

I I I

X X X

X X X

X X X X

ARCENT

JOINT

FORCES COMMAND

M A R C E N T

J F C - E

J F C - N

JALIBAH

Tigris River

Shatt al Arab

Bāţin

Hawr al H ̧ ammār

P E R S I A N

G U L F

B ū b iyān

Ar Rumaylah

oil elds

As Sālimīyah

Al Başrah

Az Zubayr Abadan

Safwān

Umm Qaşr 

Khorramshahr

Ar Rawd ̧atayn

Al Buşayyah

An Nāşirīyah

r al Bāţin

KUWAIT

Al Ah ̨madī

Ra’s al Khaī

Al Jahrah

I R A N

K U W A I T

Situation 24 February 1991

Unit positions approximate

GROUND WAR

Roadblocks

Miles

0 40

E L E V A T I O N I N F E E T

0 500 1000 1500 2000 and Above
38

coalition air attacks and psychological operations, an assessment soon 

confirmed by its feeble resistance. After a brief battle that cost them

two dead and twenty-five wounded, the French held twenty-five hundred prisoners and controlled the enemy division area, now renamed 

Rochambeau. Janvier pushed his troops on to As Salman, which they 

took without opposition and designated Objective White. The French 

consolidated White and waited for an Iraqi counterattack that never came. 

The coalition’s left flank was secure. Meanwhile, Maj. Gen. James H.

Johnson Jr.’s 82d Airborne Division carried out a mission that belied its 

airborne designation. While the division’s 2d Brigade moved with the 

French, its two remaining brigades, the 1st and 3d, trailed the advance and 

cleared a two-lane highway into southern Iraq as the main supply route 

for the troops, equipment, and supplies supporting the advance north.

The XVIII Airborne Corps’ main attack, led by Maj. Gen. J. H. 

Binford Peay III’s 101st Airborne Division, was scheduled for 0500; but 

fog over the objective forced a delay. While the weather posed problems 

for aviation and ground units, it did not abate direct-support fire missions. Corps artillery and rocket launchers poured fire on objectives and

approach routes. At 0705, Peay received the word to attack. Screened 

by Apache and Cobra attack helicopters, sixty Black Hawk and forty 

Chinook choppers of the XVIII Airborne Corps’ 18th Aviation Brigade 

began lifting the 1st Brigade into Iraq. The initial objective was Forward 

Operating Base (FOB) Cobra, a point some one hundred ten miles into 

Iraq. A total of three hundred helicopters ferried the 101st’s troops and 

equipment into the objective area in one of the largest helicopter-borne 

operations in military history.

Wherever Peay’s troops went during those initial attacks, they 

achieved tactical surprise over the scattered and disorganized foe. By 

midafternoon, they had a fast-growing group of stunned prisoners in 

custody and were expanding FOB Cobra into a major refueling point 

twenty miles across to support subsequent operations. Heavy CH–47 

Chinook helicopters lifted artillery pieces and other weapons into Cobra, 

as well as fueling equipment and building materials to create a major base. 

From the Saudi border, XVIII Corps support command units drove seven 

hundred high-speed support vehicles north with the fuel, ammunition, 

and supplies to support a drive to the Euphrates River.

As soon as the 101st secured Cobra and refueled the choppers, it 

continued its jump north. By the evening of the twenty-fourth, its units 

had cut Highway 8, about one hundred seventy miles into Iraq. Peay’s 

troops had now closed the first of several roads connecting Iraqi forces

in Kuwait with Baghdad. Spearhead units were advancing much faster 
39

than expected. To keep the momentum of the corps intact, General 

Luck gave subordinate commanders wider freedom of movement. He 

became their logistics manager, adding assets at key times and places 

to maintain the advance. But speed caused problems for combat support 

elements. Tanksthat could move up to fifty miles per hour were moving

outside the support fans of artillery batteries that could displace at only 

twenty-five to thirty miles per hour. Luck responded by leapfrogging

his artillery battalions and supply elements, a solution that cut down 

on fire support since only half the pieces could fire while the other

half raced forward. As long as Iraqi opposition remained weak, the 

risk was acceptable.

In the XVIII Corps’ mission of envelopment, the 24th Infantry 

Division had the central role of blocking the Euphrates River valley 

to prevent the northward escape of Iraqi forces in Kuwait and then 

attacking east in coordination with the VII Corps to defeat the armorheavy divisions of the Republican Guard Forces Command. Maj. Gen. 

Barry R. McCaffrey’s division had come to the theater better prepared 

for combat in the desert than any other in Army Central Command. 

Designated a Rapid Deployment Force division a decade earlier, the 

24th combined the usual mechanized infantry division components—an 

aviation brigade and three ground maneuver brigades plus combat support 

units—with extensive desert training and desert-oriented medical and 

water-purification equipment.

When the attack began, the 24th was as large as a World War I 

division, with twenty-five thousand soldiers in thirty-four battalions.

Its 241 Abrams tanks and 221 Bradley fighting vehicles provided the

necessary armor punch to penetrate Republican Guard divisions. But with 

ninety-four helicopters and oversixty-five hundred wheeled and thirteen

hundred other tracked vehicles—including seventy-two self-propelled 

artillery pieces and nine multiple rocket launchers—the division had 

given away nothing in mobility and firepower.

General McCaffrey began his division attack at 1500 with three 

subordinate units on line: the 197th Infantry Brigade on the left, the 1st 

Infantry Brigade in the center, and the 2d Infantry Brigade on the right. 

Six hours before the main attack, the 2d Squadron, 4th Cavalry, had 

pushed across the border and scouted north along the two combat trails 

toward the Iraqi lines. The reconnaissance turned up little evidence of 

the enemy, and the rapid progress of the division verified the scouts’

reports. McCaffrey’s brigades pushed about fifty milesinto Iraq, virtually

at will, and reached a position a little short of FOB Cobra in the 101st 

Airborne Division’s sector.
40

In their movement across the line of departure and whenever not 

engaging enemy forces, battalions of the 24th Infantry Division generally moved in “battle box” formation. With a cavalry troop screening 

five to ten miles to the front, four companies, or multiplatoon task

forces, dispersed to form corner positions. Heavier units of the battalion, whether composed of tanks or Bradleys, occupied one or both of 

the front corners. One company or smaller units advanced outside the 

box to provide flank security. The battalion commander placed inside

the box the vehicles carrying ammunition, fuel, and water needed to 

continue the advance in jumps of about forty miles. The box covered 

a front of about four to five miles and extended about fifteen to twenty

miles front to rear.

Following a screen of cavalry and a spearhead of the 1st and 4th 

Battalions, 64th Armor, McCaffrey’s division continued north, maintaining a speed of twenty-five to thirty miles per hour. In the flat terrain, the

24th kept on course with the aid of long-range electronic navigation, 

a satellite-reading triangulation system in use for years before Desert

Storm. Night did not stop the division, thanks to more recently developed 

image-enhancement scopes and goggles and infrared- and thermal-imaging systems sensitive to personnel and vehicle heat signatures. Around 

midnight, McCaffrey stopped his brigades on a line about seventy-five

M1A1 Abrams tank
41

miles inside Iraq. Like the rest of the XVIII Airborne Corps, the 24th 

Division had established positions deep inside Iraq against surprisingly 

light opposition.

The VII Corps, consisting mainly of the 1st Infantry Division, the 

1st and 3d Armored Divisions, the 1st Cavalry Division, the British 1st 

Armoured Division and the 2d Armored Cavalry Regiment, had the mission of finding, attacking, and destroying the heart of Saddam Hussein’s

ground forces, the armor-heavy Republican Guard. In preparation for 

that, Central Command had built up General Franks’ organization until 

it resembled a mini army more than a traditional corps. The “Jayhawk” 

corps of World War II fame numbered more than one hundred forty-two 

thousand soldiers compared with Luck’s one hundred sixteen thousand. 

To keep his troops moving and fighting, General Franks had more than

forty-eight thousand five hundred vehicles and aircraft, including 1,587

tanks, 1,502 Bradleys and armored personnel carriers, 669 artillery pieces, 

and 223 attack helicopters. To provide a sense of the logistical challenge 

to keep such a phalanx supplied, for every day of offensive operations 

the corps needed 5.6 million gallons of fuel, 3.3 million gallons of water, 

and 6,075 tons of ammunition.

The plan of advance for the VII Corps paralleled that of Luck’s 

corps to the west: a thrust north into Iraq, a massive turn to the right, and 

then an assault to the east into Kuwait. Because Franks’ sector lay east 

of Luck’s—in effect closer to the hub of the envelopment wheel—the 

VII Corps had to cover less distance than the XVIII Airborne Corps. 

But intelligence reports and probing attacks into Iraqi territory in midFebruary had shown that the VII Corps faced a denser concentration of 

enemy units than did the XVIII Corps farther west. Once the turn to the 

right was complete, both corps would coordinate their attacks east so 

as to trap Republican Guard divisions between them and then press the 

offensive along their wide path of advance until Iraq’s elite units either 

surrendered, retreated, or were destroyed.

General Schwarzkopf originally had planned the VII Corps attack for 

25 February, but the XVIII Airborne Corps advanced so quickly against 

such weak opposition that he moved up his armor attack by fourteen 

hours. Within his own sector, Franks planned a feint and envelopment 

much like the larger overall strategy. On the VII Corps’ right, along the 

Wadi al Batin, the 1st Cavalry Division would make a strong but limited 

attack directly to its front. While Iraqi units reinforced against the 1st 

Cavalry, Franks would send two divisions through sand berms and mines 

on the corps’ right and two more divisions on an “end around” into Iraq 

on the corps’ left.
42

On 24 February, the 1st Cavalry Division crossed the line of departure 

and hit the Iraqi 27th Infantry Division. That was not their first meeting.

General Tilelli’s division had actually been probing the Iraqi defenses 

for some time. As these limited thrusts continued in the area that became 

known as the Ruqi Pocket, Tilelli’s men found and destroyed elements of 

five Iraqi divisions, evidence that the 1st succeeded in its theater reserve

mission of drawing and holding enemy units.

The main VII Corps attack, coming from farther west, caught the 

defenders by surprise. At 0538, Franks sent Maj. Gen. Thomas G. 

Rhame’s 1st Infantry Division forward. The division plowed through the 

berms and hit trenches full of enemy soldiers. Once astride the trench 

lines, it turned the plow blades of its tanks and combat earthmovers along 

the Iraqi defenses and, covered by fire from Bradley crews, began to fill

them in. The 1st Division neutralized ten miles of Iraqi lines this way, 

killing or capturing all of the defenders without losing one soldier, and 

proceeded to cut twenty-foursafe lanesthrough the minefieldsfor passage

of the British 1st Armoured Division. On the far left of the corps sector 

and at the same time, the 2d ACR swept around the Iraqi obstacles and 

led 1st and 3d Armored Divisions into enemy territory.

The two armored units moved rapidly toward their objective, the 

town of Al Busayyah, site of a major logistical base about eighty miles 

into Iraq. The 1st Armored Division on the left along the XVIII Airborne 

Corps’ boundary and the 3d Armored Division on its right moved in 

compressed wedges fifteen miles wide and thirty miles deep. Screened by

cavalry squadrons, the divisions deployed tank brigades in huge triangles, 

with artillery battalions between flank brigades and support elements in

nearly one thousand vehicles trailing the artillery.

Badly mauled by air attacks before the ground operation and surprised 

by Franks’ envelopment, Iraqi forces offered little resistance. The 1st 

Infantry Division destroyed two T–55 tanks and five armored personnel

carriersin the first hour and began taking prisonersimmediately. Farther

west, the 1st and 3d Armored Divisions quickly overran several small 

infantry and armored outposts. Concerned that his two armored units were 

too dispersed from the 1st Infantry Division for mutual reinforcement, 

Franks halted the advance with both armored elements on the left only 

twenty miles into Iraq. For the day, the VII Corps rounded up about 

thirteen hundred of the enemy.

In the east, the U.S. Marine Central Command (MARCENT) began 

its attack at 0400. General Boomer’s I MEF aimed directly at its ultimate 

objective, Kuwait City. The Tiger Brigade, 2d Armored Division, and 

the 1st and 2d Marine Divisions did not have as far to go to reach their 
43

objective as did Army units to the west—Kuwait City lay between thirtyfive and fifty miles to the northeast, depending on the border-crossing

point—but they faced more elaborate defense lines and a tighter enemy 

concentration. The 1st Marine Division led from a position in the vicinity of the elbow of the southern Kuwaiti border and immediately began 

breaching berms and rows of antitank and antipersonnel mines and 

several lines of concertina wire. The unit did not have Abrams tanks, but 

its M60A3 Patton tanks and TOW-equipped high mobility multipurpose 

wheeled vehicles,supported by heavy artillery, proved sufficient against

Iraqi T–55 and T–62 tanks. After the marines destroyed two tanks in only 

a few minutes, three thousand Iraqis surrendered.

At 0530, the 2d Marine Division, with Col. John B. Sylvester’s Tiger 

Brigade on its west flank, attacked in the western part of the MARCENT

sector. The Army armored brigade, equipped with M1A1 Abrams tanks, 

gave the marines enough firepower to defeat any armored unitsthe Iraqis

put between Boomer’s force and Kuwait City. The first opposition came

from a berm line and two mine belts. Marine M60A1 tanks with bulldozer 

blades quickly breached the berm, but the mine belts required more time 

and sophisticated equipment. Marine engineers used mine-clearing line 

charges and M60A1 tanks with forked mine plows to clear six lanes in 

the division center, between the Umm Qudayr and Al Wafrah oil fields.

By late afternoon, the Tiger Brigade had passed the mine belts. As soon 

as other units passed through the safe lanes, the 2d Marine Division 

The 1st Armored Division pushes north.
44

repositioned to continue the advance north, with regiments on the right 

and in the center and the Tiger Brigade on the left tying in with the 

coalition forces.

Moving ahead a short distance to a major east-west highway by the 

end of the day, the 2d Marine Division captured intact the Iraqi 9th Tank 

Battalion with thirty-five T–55 tanks and more than five thousand men.

Already, on the first day of ground operations, the number of captives

had become a problem in the marine sector. After a fight for Al Jaber

Airfield, during which the 1st Marine Division destroyed twenty-one

tanks, another three thousand prisoners were seized. By the end of the 

day, the I Marine Expeditionary Force had worked its way about twenty 

miles into Kuwait and taken nearly ten thousand Iraqi prisoners.

Day Two: 25 February 1991

On 25 February, XVIII Airborne Corps units continued their drive 

into Iraq. The 82d Airborne Division began its first sustained movement

of the war; although, to the disappointment of General Johnson and his 

troops, the division had to stay on the ground and rode to its objectives 

in trucks. The 82d followed the French 6th Light Armored Division 

north to As Salman. Meanwhile, the 101st Airborne Division sent its 3d 

Brigade out of objective Cobra on an air-assault jump north to occupy 

an observation and blocking position on the south bank of the Euphrates 

River just west of the town of An Nasinyah. (Map 5)

In the early morning darkness of the same day, General McCaffrey 

put his 24th Infantry Division in motion toward its first major objective.

Following close air support and artillery fires, the division’s 197th

Brigade attacked at 0300 toward Objective Brown in the western part 

of the division sector. Instead of determined opposition, the brigade 

found only a handful of hungry Iraqis dazed by the heavy artillery 

preparation. By 0700, the 197th had cleared the area around Brown and 

established blocking positions to the east and west along a trail, which 

was then being improved to serve as the Corps main supply route. Six 

hours later, the division’s 2d Brigade followed its own artillery fires and

attacked Objective Grey on the right, encountering no enemy fire and

taking three hundred prisoners. After clearing the area, the brigade set 

blocking positions to the east.

At 1450, with the 2d Brigade on Objective Grey, the 1st Brigade 

moved northwest into the center of the division sector and then angled 

to the division right, attacking Objective Red directly north of Grey. 

Seven hours later, the brigade had cleared the Red area, set blocking 

positions to the east and north, and processed two hundred captives. 
45

To the surprise of all, the 24th Division had taken three major objectives and hundreds of men in only nineteen hours while meeting weak 

resistance from isolated pockets of Iraqi soldiers from the 26th and 35th 

Infantry Divisions. By the end of the day, the XVIII Airborne Corps had 

advanced in all division sectors to take important objectives, establish a 

functioning forward operating base, place brigade-size blocking forces 

in the Euphrates River valley, and capture thousands of prisoners of 

war—at a cost of two killed in action and two missing.

In the VII Corps, General Franks faced two problems on this second 

day of ground operations. The British 1st Armoured Division, one of the 

units he had to have when he met the Republican Guard armored force, 

had begun passage of the mine breach cut by the 1st Infantry Division at 

1200 on the twenty-fifth but would not be completely through forseveral

hours, possibly not until the next day. With the 1st and 3d Armored 

Divisions along the western edge of the corps sector and the British not 

yet inside Iraq, the 1st Infantry and 1st Cavalry Divisions lay vulnerable 

to an armored counterattack.

A more troubling situation had developed along the VII Corps’ right 

flank. The commitment of some coalition contingents had concerned

General Schwarzkopf months before the start of the ground war. Worried 

about postwar relations with Arab neighbors, some Arab members of the 

coalition had expressed reluctance to attack Iraq or even enter Kuwait. 

If enough of their forces sat out the ground phase of the war, the entire 

mission of liberating Kuwait might fail. To prevent such a disaster, 

Schwarzkopf had put the 1st Cavalry Division next to coalition units 

and gave the division the limited mission of conducting holding attacks 

and standing by to reinforce allies on the other side of the Wadi al Batin. 

If Joint Forces Command–North performed well, the division would be 

moved from the corps boundary and given an attack mission. Action on 

the first day of the ground war bore out the wisdom of holding the unit

ready to reinforce allies to the east. Syrian and Egyptian forces had not 

moved forward, and a huge gap had opened in the coalition line. U.S. 

Central Command notified the 2d ACR to prepare to assist the 1st Cavalry

Division in taking over the advance east of the Wadi al Batin.

But Franks could not freeze his advance indefinitely. The VII Corps

had to press the attack where possible, and that meant on the left flank.

Maj. Gen. Ronald H. Griffith’s 1st Armored Division and Maj. Gen. Paul

E. Funk’s 3d Armored Division resumed their advance north shortly 

after daybreak. Griffith’s troops made contact first, with outpost units

of the Iraqi 26th Infantry Division. With the 1st Armored Division still 

about thirty-five to forty miles away from its objective, Griffith’s troops
1 C

1

X X

3

I I I

1

X X

2 24

X

197

X 1 

6 FR LT X

X X

X X

82 (-)

X X

101(-)

X

3 101

X X X

GREY

BROWN

RED

WHITE

COBRA

X V I I I A B N C O R P S

V I I C O R P S

Euphrates River

Wādī al B

TALLIL

As Salmān

Ash Shabakah

H ̧ afar 

Rafh ̧ā

As Samāwah

S A U D I A R A B I A

I R A Q 

Map 5
X

4 EG

X X

1 2

X

9 SY

X X

av

X X

1 Br

X X

3

X X

3 EG

X X

1 Mar

X X

2 Mar

X X

20 SA

X

X

X 10 SA

X

2

I I I

24

5 MEB

X

X X X

X X X

X X X X

ARCENT

JOINT

FORCES COMMAND

M A R C E N T

J F C - E

J F C - N

Tigris River

Shatt al Arab

P E R S I A N

G U L F

al Bāţin

Hawr al H ̧ ammār

JALIBAH

Ar Rumaylah

oil elds

Bū b iyān

As Sālimīyah

Al Başrah

Az Zubayr Abadan

Safwān

Umm Qaşr 

Khorramshahr

Ar Rawd ̧atayn

Al Buşayyah

An Nāşirīyah

r al Bāţin

KUWAIT

Ra’s al Khaī

Al Jahrah

I R A N

K U W A I T

Situation 25 February 1991

Unit positions approximate

GROUND WAR

Miles

0 40

E L E V A T I O N I N F E E T

0 500 1000 1500 2000 and Above
48

coordinated close air support strikes followed by attack helicopter runs on 

enemy targets. As the division closed to about ten to fifteen miles, artillery, rocket launchers, and tactical missile batteries delivered preparatory 

fires. As division lead elements came into visual range, psychological

operations teams broadcast surrender appeals. If the Iraqis fired on the

approaching Americans, the attackers repeated artillery, rocket, and missile strikes. In the experience of the 1st Armored Division, that sequence 

was enough to gain the surrender of most Iraqi Army units on a given 

objective. Only once did the Iraqis mount an attack after a broadcast; 

and in that instance, a 1st Armored Division brigade destroyed forty to 

fifty tanks and armored personnel carriers in ten minutes at a range of

1.2 miles.

By the late morning of 25 February, Joint Forces Command–North 

had made enough progress to allow the VII Corps and Marine Central 

Command on the flanks to resume their advance. That afternoon and

night in the 1st Infantry Division sector, the Americans expanded their 

mine breach and captured two enemy brigade command posts and the 

26th Infantry Division command post with a brigadier general and 

complete staff. Behind them, the British 1st Armoured Division made 

good progress through the mine breach and prepared to turn right and 

attack the Iraqi 52d Armored Division.

Approaching Al Busayyah in early afternoon, the 1st Armored 

Division directed close air support and attack helicopter sorties on an 

Iraqi brigade position, destroying artillery pieces, several vehicles, and 

taking nearly three hundred prisoners. That night, the 2d ACR and 3d 

Armored Division oriented east and encountered isolated enemy units 

under conditions of high winds and heavy rains.

With the coalition advance well under way all along the line, a U.S. 

Navy amphibious force made its final effort to convince the Iraqis that

CENTCOM would launch a major amphibious assault into Kuwait. 

Beginning late on 24 February and continuing over the following two 

days, the Navy landed the 7,500-man 5th Marine Expeditionary Brigade 

at Al Mish’ab, Saudi Arabia, about twenty-eight miles south of the 

border with Kuwait. Once ashore, the 5th became the reserve for Joint 

Forces Command–East. Later investigation showed that the presence of 

the amphibious force in Persian Gulf waters before the ground war had 

forced the Iraqi command to hold in Kuwait as many as four divisions 

to meet an amphibious assault that never materialized.

At daybreak on 25 February, Iraqi units made their first counterattack

in the Marine sector, hitting the 2d Marine Division right and center. 

While Marine regiments fought off an effort that they named the Reveille 
49

Counterattack, troops of the Tiger Brigade raced north on the left. In the 

morning, the brigade cleared one bunker complex and destroyed seven 

artillery pieces and several armored personnel carriers. After a midday 

halt, the brigade cleared another bunker complex and captured the Iraqi 

116th Brigade commander among a total of eleven hundred prisoners 

of war for the day. In the center of the corps sector, the marines overran 

an agricultural production facility, called the Ice Cube Tray because of 

its appearance to aerial observers.

By the end of operations on 25 February, General Schwarzkopf for 

the second straight day had reports of significant gains in all sectors.

But enemy forces could still inflict damage and in surprising ways and

places. The Iraqis continued their puzzling policy ofsetting oil fires—well

over two hundred now blazed out of control—as well as their strategy 

of punishing Saudi Arabia and provoking Israel by Scud attacks. They 

launched four Scuds, one of which, as mentioned earlier, slammed into a 

building filled with sleeping American troopsin Dhahran and caused the

highest one-day casualty total for American forces in a war of surprisingly low losses to date.

Day Three: 26 February 1991

On 26 February, the XVIII Airborne Corps units turned their attack 

northeast and entered the Euphrates River valley. With the French and the 

101st and 82d Airborne Divisions protecting the west and north flanks,

the 24th Infantry Division spearheaded Luck’s attack into the valley. 

The first obstacle was the weather. An out-of-season shamal (extreme 

Desert Storm, 101st Style by Peter Varisano
50

windstorm) in the objective area kicked up thick clouds of swirling dust 

that promised to give thermal-imaging equipment a rigorous field test

throughout the day.

After refueling in the morning, all three brigades of the 24th Division 

moved out at 1400 toward the Iraqi airfields at Jabbah and Tallil.

(Map 6) The 1st Brigade went north, then east about forty miles to take a 

battle position in the northeast corner of the corps sector; the 2d Brigade 

moved thirty-five miles north to a position along the eastern corps boundary and then continued its advance another twenty-five miles until it was

only fifteen milessouth ofJahbah; and the 197th Brigade went northeast

about sixty miles to a position just south of Tallil. Meanwhile, the 3d 

ACR screened to the east on the division’s south flank.

During these attacks, the 24th encountered its heaviest resistance of 

the war. The Iraqi 47th and 49th Infantry Divisions, the Nebuchadnezzar 

Division of the Republican Guard, and the 26th Commando Brigade took 

heavy fire but stood and fought. The 1st Brigade took direct tank and

artillery fire for four hours. For the first time in the advance, the terrain

gave the enemy a clear advantage. McCaffrey’s troops found Iraqi artillery and automatic weapons dug into rocky escarpments reminiscent of 

the Japanese positions in coral outcroppings on Pacific islands that an

earlier generation of 24th Infantry Division soldiers had faced. But Iraqi 

troops were not as tenacious in defense as the Japanese had been, and the 

24th had much better weapons than its predecessor. American artillery 

crews located enemy batteries with their Firefinder radars and returned

between three and six rounds for every round of incoming. With that 

advantage, American gunners destroyed six full Iraqi artillery battalions.

In the dust storm and darkness, American technological advantages 

became clearer still. Thermal-imaging systems in tanks, Bradleys, and 

attack helicopters worked so well that crews could spot and hit Iraqi tanks 

at up to four thousand meters (two-and-a-half miles) before the Iraqis 

even saw them. American tank crews were at first surprised at their onesided success then exulted in the curious result of their accurate fire: the

“pop-top” phenomenon. Because Soviet-made tank turrets were held in 

place by gravity, a killing hit blew the turret completely off. As the battle 

wore on, the desert floor became littered with pop-tops. A combination

of superior weaponry and technique—precise Abrams tank and Apache 

helicopter gunnery, 25-mm. automatic cannon fire from the Bradleys,

overwhelming artillery and rocket direct-support and counterbattery 

fire, and air superiority—took the 24th Division through enemy armor

and artillery units in those “valley battles” and brought Iraqi troops out 

of their bunkers and vehicles in droves with hands raised in surrender. 
51

After a hard but victorious day and night of fighting, the 2d Brigade

took its objectives by 2000 on the twenty-sixth. The other two brigades 

accomplished their missions by dawn.

In the VII Corps’ sector on 26 February, the 1st Armored Division 

fired heavy artillery and rocket preparatory firesinto Al Busayyah shortly

after dawn and by noon had advanced through a sandstorm to overrun 

the small town. In the process, General Griffith’s troops completed the

destruction of the Iraqi 26th Infantry Division and, once in the objective 

area, discovered they had taken the enemy VII Corps headquarters and 

a corps logistical base as well. More than one hundred tons of munitions 

were captured and large numbers of tanks and other vehicles destroyed. 

The 1st Armored Division pressed on, turning northeast and hitting the 

Tawakalna Division of the Republican Guard. Late that night, Griffith

mounted a night assault on the elite enemy unit and, in fighting that

continued the next day, killed thirty to thirty-five tanks and ten to fifteen

other vehicles.

In the 3d Armored Division sector, General Funk’s men attacked to 

the east of Al Busayyah. Through the evening, the division fought its 

toughest battles in defeating elements of the Tawakalna Division. The

VII Corps reached the wheeling point in its advance and began to pivot 

to the east. From here, General Franks’ divisions began the main assault 

on Republican Guard strongholds. Meanwhile, the 1st Infantry Division 

was ordered north from its position inside the mine-belt breach. As the 

attack east began, the VII Corps presented in the northern part of its sector 

a front of three divisions and one regiment: the 1st Armored Division 

on the left (north) and the 3d Armored Division, the 2d ACR, and the 

1st Infantry Division on the right (south). Farther south, the British 1st 

Multiple-launch rocket system (MLRS) battery
1 Cav

3

I 

6 FR LT

X X

X X

82 (-)

X X

101(-)

X

3 101

197

X

X X X

X V I I I A B N C O R P S

V I I C O 

Wādī al B

TALLIL

As Salmān

Ash Shabakah

H ̧ afa

Rafh ̧ā

As Samāwah

S A U D I A R A B I A

I R A Q 

Map 6
X

4 EG

X X

1 2

X

9 SY

X X

X X 1 Br

X X

3

X X

1

X X

3 EG

X X

1 Mar

X X

2 Mar

X X

20 SA

X

X

X 10 SA

X

2

I I I

I I

1

X X

1 24

X

2 24

X

X X X

X X X

X X X X

COLLINS

ARCENT

JOINT

FORCES COMMAND

M A R C E N T

J F C - E

J F C - N

R P S

Tigris River

Shatt al Arab

P E R S I A N

G U L F

l Bāţin

Hawr al H ̧ ammār

JALIBAH

Ar Rumaylah

oil elds

B ū b iyān

Al Başrah

Az Zubayr

Abadan

Safwān

Umm Qaşr 

Khorramshahr

Ar Rawd ̧atayn

Al Buşayyah

An Nāşirīyah

r al Bāţin

KUWAIT

Ra’s al Khaī

Al Jahrah

I R A N

K U W A I T

Situation 26 February 1991

Unit positions approximate

GROUND WAR

Miles

0 40

E L E V A T I O N I N F E E T

0 500 1000 1500 2000 and Above
54

Armoured Division, with over seven thousand vehicles, cleared the mine 

breach at 0200 and deployed to advance on a separate axis toward its 

objective and on to the corps boundary. From ARCENT headquarters 

came word that the VII Corps would soon be even stronger. At 0930, the 

ARCENT commander, Lt. Gen. John J. Yeosock, released the 1st Cavalry 

Division from its theater reserve role and gave it to the VII Corps. Now 

the Corps had an additional, large, and heavily armored exploitation 

force to pursue the Iraqis wherever they turned.

In the early afternoon, the 2d ACR advanced east of Objective Collins

in the middle of the shamal. The regiment, screening in front of 1st Infantry 

Division, had just arrived from the mine belt along the Saudi border that it 

had breached during the first day of the ground war. The cavalrymen had

only a general idea of the enemy’s position. The Iraqis had long expected 

the American attack to come from the south and east and were now frantically turning hundreds of tanks, towed artillery pieces, and other vehicles 

to meet the onslaught from the west. On the Iraqi side, unit locations 

were changing almost by the minute. As the cavalry troopers neared the 

69 Easting, a north-south map line, one of the cavalry troops received fire

from a building. The soldiersreturned fire and continued east. More enemy

fire came in during the next two hours and was immediately returned.

Just after 1600, the cavalrymen found T–72 tanks in prepared positions at 

73 Easting. The regiment used its thermal-imaging equipment to deadly 

advantage, killing every tank that appeared in its sights. But this was a 

different kind of battle than Americans had fought so far. The destruction 

of the first tanks did not signal the surrender of hundreds of Iraqi soldiers.

The tanks kept coming and fighting.

The reason for the unusually determined enemy fire and large number

of tanks soon became clear. The cavalrymen had found two Iraqi divisions 

willing to put up a hard fight: the 12th Armored Division and the Tawakalna 

Division. Col. Leonard D. Holder Jr.’s regiment found a seam between 

the two divisions and for a time became the only American unit obviously 

outnumbered and outgunned during the ground campaign. But, as the 24th 

Division had found in its valley battles, thermal-imaging equipment cut 

through the dust storm to give gunners a long-range view of enemy vehicles 

and grant the fatal first-shot advantage. Forfour hours, Holder’s men killed

tanks and armored personnel carriers while attack helicopters knocked 

out artillery batteries. When the battle of 73 Easting ended at 1715, the 2d 

ACR had destroyed at least twenty-nine tanks and twenty-four armored 

personnel carriers, as well as numerous other vehicles and bunkers, and 

had taken thirteen hundred prisoners. That night, the 1st Infantry Division 

passed through Holder’s cavalrymen and continued the attack east.
55

Farther to the south, the British 1st Armoured Division attacked 

eastward through the 48th Infantry and 52d Armored Divisions and 

remnants of other Iraqi units trying to withdraw north. This attack marked 

the start of nearly two days of continuous combat for the British, some 

of the toughest fighting of the war. In the largest of this series of running

battles, the British destroyed forty tanks and captured an Iraqi division 

commander.

To the east, the Marine advance resumed on the twenty-sixth with 

the two Marine divisions diverging from their parallel course of the 

first two days. The 2d Marine Division and the Army’s Tiger Brigade,

the 1st Brigade of the 2d Armored Division, continued driving directly 

north while the 1st Marine Division turned northeast toward Kuwait 

International Airport. The army tankers headed toward Mutla Ridge, an 

extended fold in the ground about twenty-five feet high. The location

next to the juncture of two multilane highways in the town of Al Jahrah, 

a suburb of Kuwait City, rather than the elevation, had caught General 

Boomer’s attention weeks earlier. By occupying the ridge, the brigade 

could seal a major crossroads and slam the door on Iraqi columns escaping 

north to Baghdad.

Night Attack by Mario Acevedo
56

The brigade advanced at 1200 with the 3d Battalion, 67th Armor, in 

the lead. Approaching Mutla Ridge, the Americansfound a minefield and

waited for the plows to cut a safety lane. On the move again, the brigade 

began to find enemy bunker complexes and dug-in armored units. Enemy

tanks, almost all of the T–55 type, were destroyed wherever encountered, 

and most bunkers yielded still more prisoners. During a three-hour running battle in the early evening, Tiger tankers cleared the Mutla police 

post and surrounding area. Moving up and over Mutla Ridge, the 67th’s 

tanks found and destroyed numerous antiaircraft artillery positions. 

Perimeter consolidation at the end of the day’s advance was complicated 

and delayed by the need to process an even larger number of prisoners 

of war than the day before: sixteen hundred.

The Tiger Brigade now controlled the highest point for hundreds 

of miles in any direction. When the troops looked down on the highways from Mutla Ridge, they saw the largest target an armored brigade 

had probably ever seen: hundreds of shattered enemy vehicles of all 

types. The previous night, Air Force and Navy aircraft had begun 

destroying all vehicles spotted fleeing from Kuwait. Now the brigade

added its firepower to the continuous air strikes. On the “Highway of

Death,” they could see hundreds of burning and exploding vehicles, 

including civilian automobiles, buses, and trucks. Hundreds more 

raced west out of Kuwait City to unknowingly join the deadly traffic

jam. Here and there, knots of drivers, Iraqi soldiers, and refugees fled

into the desert because of the inferno of bombs, rockets, and tank 

fire. These lucky ones managed to escape and join the ranks of the

growing army of prisoners.

At the close of coalition operations on 26 February, a total of 

twenty-four Iraqi divisions had been defeated. In all sectors, the volume 

of prisoners continued to grow and clog roads and logistical areas. Iraqi 

soldiers surrendered faster than the Central Command could count them, 

but military police units estimated that the total now exceeded thirty 

thousand.

The day ended with at least one other major logistical problem. The 

24th Division had moved so fast in two days that fuel trucks had difficulty keeping up. After taking positions on the night of the twenty-sixth,

the lead tanks had on average less than one hundred gallons of fuel on 

board. Brigade commanders had the fuel, but lead elements were not sure 

where to rendezvous in the desert. The problem was solved by the kind 

of unplanned actions on which victories often turn. A small number of 

junior officers took the initiative to lead tanker-truck convoys across the

desert at night with only a vague idea of where either brigade fuel supplies 
57

or needy assault units were located. By approaching whatever vehicles 

came into view and asking for unit identity, those leaders managed to 

refuel most of the division’s vehicles by midnight.

Day Four: 27 February 1991

On the morning of 27 February, the XVIII Airborne Corps prepared 

to continue its advance east toward Al Basrah. Before the assault could 

resume, the 24th Infantry Division had to secure its positions in the 

Euphrates River valley by taking the two airfields toward which it had

been moving. Tallil Airfield lay about twenty miles south of the town of

An Nasiriyah; Jalibah Airfield lay forty miles east by southeast, near the

lake at Hawr al Malih. The task of taking the airfields went to the units

that had ended the previous day in positions closest to them. While the 

1st Brigade would conduct a fixing attack toward the Jalibah Airfield,

the 2d Brigade planned to move east about twenty-five miles and turn

north against the same objective. Moving north, the 197th Brigade would 

take Tallil. (Map 7)

Following a four-hour rest, the 2d Brigade attacked at midnight, 

seized a position just south of Jalibah by 0200 on the twenty-seventh, 

and stayed there while preparatory fires continued to fall on the airfield.

At 0600, the 1st Brigade moved east toward the airfield, stopped short,

and continued firing on Iraqi positions. At the same time, the 2d Brigade

resumed the attack with three infantry-armor task forces and crashed 

through a fence around the runways. Although the airfield had been

hit by air strikes for six weeks and a heavy artillery preparation by 

five battalions of the XVIII Corps’ 212th Field Artillery Brigade, Iraqi

defenders were still willing to fight. Most Iraqi fire was from ineffectual

small arms; but armor-piercing rounds hit two Bradleys, killing two men 

of the 1st Battalion, 64th Armor, and wounding several others in the 

3d Battalion, 15th Infantry. As nearly two hundred American armored 

vehicles moved across the airfield knocking out tanks, artillery pieces,

and even aircraft, Iraqis began to surrender in large numbers. By 1000, 

the Jalibah Airfield was secure.

At midday, heavy-artillery and rocket-launcher preparations, followed by twenty-eight close air sorties, were directed on Tallil Airfield.

As the fires lifted, the 197th Brigade advanced across the cratered

runways and through weaker resistance than that at Jalibah. But, like the 

2d Brigade at Jalibah, the 197th killed both armored vehicles and aircraft 

on the ground and found large numbers of willing prisoners.

As the 197th Brigade assaulted Tallil, General McCaffrey realigned 

his other units to continue the attack east centering on Highway 8. 
6 FR LT

X X

X X

X X 82

101(-)

X

3 101

197

X X X

X V I I I A B N C O R P S

V I I 

Wādī al B

TALLIL

As Salmān

Ash Shabakah

H ̧ afar 

Rafh ̧ā

As Samāwah

S A U D I A R A B I A

I R A Q 

Map 7
X

4 EG

X X

1 2

X 9 SY

X X

1 Cav

X X

1 Br

X X

3

X X

1

X X

3 EG

X X

1 Mar

2 Mar X X

X X

20 SA

X

X

X 10 SA

X

2

I I I

3

I I I

1

X X

24(-)

X X

X

2 101

X

X X X

X X X

X X X X

ARCENT

JOINT

FORCES COMMAND

M A R C E N T

J F C - E

J F C - N

C O R P S

Tigris River

Shatt al Arab

P E R S I A N

G U L F

l Bāţin

Hawr al H ̧ ammār

JALIBAH

Bū b iyān

As Sālimīyah

Al Başrah

Az Zubayr

Abadan

Safwān

Umm Qaşr 

Khorramshahr

Ar Rawd ̧atayn

Al Buşayyah

An Nāşirīyah

r al Bāţin

KUWAIT

Ra’s al Khaī

Al Jahrah

I R A N

K U W A I T

Situation 27 February 1991

Unit positions approximate

GROUND WAR

Miles

0 40

E L E V A T I O N I N F E E T

0 500 1000 1500 2000 and Above
60

The 1st Brigade took the division left (north) sector, tying in with the 

101st Airborne Division. The 2d Squadron, 4th Cavalry, the 24th’s 

reconnaissance unit, moved east from the Hawr al Malih lake area to 

set up a tactical assembly area behind the 1st Brigade. The 2d Brigade 

left its newly won airfield position and assumed the center sector of

the division front. The 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment took the right 

sector, tying in with the VII Corps to the south. With the 24th Division 

now oriented east after its northern advance of the first two days, a new

series of attacks began between the Tallil Airfield and the Ar Rumaylah

oil fields just southwest of Al Basrah.

The attacks down Highway 8 showed more clearly than any other 

episode the weaknesses of Iraqi field forces and the one-sidedness of the

conflict. Through the afternoon and night of 27 February, the tankers,

Bradley gunners, and helicopter crews and artillerymen of the 24th 

Infantry Division fired at hundreds of vehiclestrying to redeploy to meet

the new American attack from the west or simply to escape north across 

the Euphrates River valley and west on Highway 8. With no intelligence 

capability left to judge the size or location of the oncoming American 

armored wedges and attack-helicopter swarms, as well as insufficient

communications to coordinate a new defense, Iraqi units stumbled into 

disaster. Unsuspecting drivers of every type of vehicle, from tanks to 

artillery prime movers and even commandeered civilian autos, raced 

randomly across the desert or west on Highway 8 only to run into 

General McCaffrey’s firestorm. Some drivers, seeing vehicles explode

and burn, veered off the road in vain attempts to escape. Others stopped, 

dismounted, and walked toward the Americans with raised hands. 

When the division staff detected elements of the Hammurabi Division

of the Republican Guard moving across the 24th’s front, McCaffrey 

concentrated the fire of nine artillery battalions and an Apache battalion

on the once-elite enemy force. At dawn the next day, the twenty-eighth, 

hundreds of vehicles lay crumpled and smoking on Highway 8 and at 

scattered points across the desert. The 24th’s lead elements, only thirty 

miles west of Al Basrah, set up a hasty defense in place.

The 24th Division’s valley battles of 25–27 February rendered 

ineffective all Iraqi units encountered in the division sector and trapped 

most of the Republican Guard divisions to the south while the VII Corps 

bore into them from the west, either blasting units in place or taking 

their surrender. In its own battles, the 24th achieved some of the most 

impressive results of the ground war. McCaffrey’s troops had advanced 

one hundred ninety miles into Iraq to the Euphrates River, then turned 

east and advanced another seventy miles, all in four days. Along the way, 
61

they knocked out over 360 tanks and armored personnel carriers, over 

300 artillery pieces, over 1,200 trucks, 500 pieces of engineer equipment, 

19 missiles, and 25 aircraft and rounded up over 5,000 enemy soldiers. 

Just as surprising as these large enemy losses were the small numbers 

of American casualties: 8 killed in action, 36 wounded in action, and 5 

nonbattle injuries. In the entire XVIII Airborne Corps, combat equipment 

losses were negligible: only 4 M1A1 tanks, 3 of which were repairable.

In the VII Corps’ sector, the advance rolled east. The battles begun 

the previous afternoon continued through the morning of 27 February 

as General Franks’ divisions bore into Republican Guard units trying 

to reposition or escape. As the assault gained momentum, Franks for 

the first time deployed his full combat power. The 1st Cavalry Division

made good progress through the 1st Infantry Division breach and up the 

left side of the VII Corps’ sector. By midafternoon, after a high-speed 

190-mile move north, General Tilelli’s brigades were behind the 1st 

Armored Division tying in with the 24th Infantry Division across the 

corps boundary. Now Franks could send against the Republican Guard

five full divisions and a separate regiment. From left (north) to right, the

VII Corps deployed the 1st Armored Division, 1st Cavalry Division, 3d 

Armored Division, 1st Infantry Division, 2d Armored Cavalry Regiment, 

and the British 1st Armoured Division.

The dust storms had cleared early in the day, revealing in the VII 

Corps’ sector an awesome array of armored and mechanized power. In 

a panorama extending beyond visual limits, 1,500 tanks, another 1,500 

Bradleys and armored personnel carriers, 650 artillery pieces, and supply 

columns of hundreds of vehicles stretching into the dusty, brown distance 

rolled east through Iraqi positions, as inexorable as a lava flow. To Iraqi

units, depleted and demoralized by forty-one days of continuous air 

assault, the VII Corps’ advance appeared irresistible.

Turning on the enemy the full range of its weapons, the VII Corps 

systematically destroyed Iraqi military power in its sector. About fifty

miles east of Al Busayyah, the 1st and 3d Armored Divisions tore 

into remnants of the Tawalkana, Medina, and Adnan Divisions of the 

Republican Guard. In one of several large engagements along the 

advance, the 2d Brigade, 1st Armored Division, received artillery fire

and then proceeded to destroy not only those artillery batteries but also 

sixty-one tanks and thirty-four armored personnel carriers of the Medina 

Division in less than one hour. The 1st Infantry Division overran the 12th 

Armored Division and scattered the 10th Armored Division into retreat. 

On the south flank, the British 1st Armoured Division destroyed the

52d Armored Division then overran three infantry divisions. To finish
62

destruction of the Republican Guard Forces Command, General Franks 

conducted a giant envelopment involving the 1st Cavalry Division on 

the left and the 1st Infantry Division on the right. The trap closed on 

disorganized bands of Iraqis streaming north in full retreat. The only 

setback for the VII Corps during this climactic assault occurred in the 

British sector. American Air Force A–10 Thunderbolt aircraft supporting 

the British advance mistakenly fired on two infantry fighting vehicles,

killing nine British soldiers.

At 1700, Franks informed his divisions of an imminent theaterwide 

cease-fire but pressed the VII Corps attack farther east. An hour later,

the 1st Squadron, 4th Cavalry, 1st Infantry Division, set a blocking 

position on the north-south highway connecting Al Basrah to Kuwait 

City. The next morning, corps artillery units fired an enormous preparation involving all long-range weapons: 155-mm. and 8-inch (203-mm.) 

self-propelled pieces, rocket launchers, and tactical missiles. Attack 

helicopters followed to strike suspected enemy positions. The advance 

east continued a short time until the cease-fire went into effect at 0800,

28 February, with American armored divisions well inside Kuwait.

In ninety hours of continuous movement and combat, the VII Corps 

had achieved impressive results against the best units of the Iraqi military. 

Franks’ troops destroyed more than a dozen Iraqi divisions, an estimated 

1,300 tanks, 1,200 infantry fighting vehicles and armored personnel carriers, 285 artillery pieces, and 100 air-defense systems and had captured 

nearly 22,000 men. At the same time, the best Iraqi divisions destroyed 

only 7 Abrams tanks, 15 Bradleys, 2 armored personnel carriers, and 

1 Apache helicopter. And, while killing unknown thousands of enemy 

troops, the VII Corps lost twenty-two soldiers killed in action.

In the Marine Central Command’s sector on 27 February, the 2d 

Armored Division’s Tiger Brigade and the 2d Marine Division began 

the fourth day of the ground war by holding positions and maintaining 

close liaison with Joint Forces Command–North units on the left flank.

The next phase of operations in Kuwait would see Saudi-commanded 

units pass through General Boomer’s sector from west to east and go 

on to liberate Kuwait City. At 0550, Tiger troops made contact with 

Egyptian units; four hours later, JFC-N columns passed through the 2d 

Marine Division. During the rest of the day, Tiger troops cleared bunker 

complexes, Ali Al Salem Airfield, and the Kuwaiti Royal Summer Palace,

while processing a continuous stream of prisoners of war. The Army 

brigade and the 2d Marine Division remained on Mutla Ridge and Phase 

Line Bear until the cease-fire went into effect at 0800 on 28 February.

Prisoner interrogation during and after combat operations revealed that 
63

the Tiger Brigade advance had split the seam between the Iraqi III and 

IV Corps, overrunning elements of the 14th, 7th, and 36th Infantry 

Divisions, as well as brigades of the 3d Armored, 1st Mechanized, and 

2d Infantry Divisions. During four days of combat, Tiger Brigade task 

forces destroyed or captured 181 tanks, 148 armored personnel carriers, 

40 artillery pieces, and 27 antiaircraft systems while killing an estimated 

263 enemy and capturing 4,051 prisoners of war, all at a cost of 2 killed 

and 5 wounded.

Cease-fire

When the cease-fire ordered by President Bush went into effect,

coalition divisions faced the beaten remnants of a once-formidable force. 

The U.S. Army had contributed the bulk of the ground combat power 

that defeated and very nearly destroyed the Iraqi ground forces. The 

Iraqis lost 3,847 of their 4,280 tanks, over half of their 2,880 armored 

personnel carriers, and nearly all of their 3,100 artillery pieces. Only 

five to seven of their forty-three combat divisions remained capable of

offensive operations. In the days after the cease-fire, the busiest soldiers

were those engaged in the monumental task of counting and caring for an 

estimated sixty thousand prisoners. And these surprising results came at 

the cost of 148 Americans killed in action. In the theater of operations, 

Burning oil fields in Kuwait sabotaged by retreating Iraqi troops
64

the U.S. military and its allies had won arguably the fastest and most 

complete victory in American military history. Kuwait had been liberated.

Analysis

Of the many successful aspects of Army operations during Operation 

Desert Storm, three stand out. First, Army units moved so fast that 

they found their enemy consistently out of position and oriented in the 

wrong direction. In one hundred hours of combat, the XVIII Airborne 

Corps moved its lead elements one hundred ninety miles north into Iraq 

and then seventy miles east. The armor-heavy VII Corps drove one 

hundred miles into Iraq and then fifty-five miles east. Iraqi units showed

themselves unable to reposition even short distances before U.S. Army 

units were upon them. This use of the element of surprise was largely 

possible because of the total U.S. control of the air, which made any 

Iraqi reconnaissance flights impossible.

Second, American forces enjoyed substantial technological advantages, most notably in night vision and electro-optics. Two types of 

vision-enhancing technology had been incorporated into Army operations preceding the deployment to the Persian Gulf. One of these aids 

represented advanced development of a device first field-tested during

the Vietnam War, the image intensification system known as Starlight.

Gathering and concentrating the faint light of the moon and stars, Starlight 

offered a view of terrain out to about one hundred yards in shades similar 

to a photographic negative. It did not depend on a transmitted beam 

that an adversary could detect. Still, it had drawbacks, among them the 

system’s need for a clear night as well as its expense, weight, and size. 

So, the early Starlight scopes had been distributed only to specialized 

units such as long-range patrol and sniper teams. Thermal-sight mounts 

in M1A1 tanks, M2/M3 Bradleys, and most helicopters were a generation newer and more capable than the Starlight scopes. Picking up heat 

differentials within their field of view, they allowed trained operators to

see in darkness as if it were daylight. American troops in Desert Storm

truly “owned the night.”

Other products of advanced technology contributed significantly

to success. A number of location and navigation devices, early global 

positioning systems (GPS), minimized disorientation on the ground, a 

perennially serious problem that was magnified by the featureless desert

environs of Southwest Asia. They all had solid-state electronics that 

read transmissions from orbiting satellites and gave their users precise 

coordinate locations. Using these devices, the troops could determine 

firing data for artillery units, correct azimuth bearings to objectives,
65

and measure angles of descent for aircraft heading for landing zones or 

targets. Iraqis were astonished by the ease with which large American 

formations navigated the featureless desert guided unerringly by GPS. 

It seemed as if age-old problems of map- or terrain-reading errors were 

soon to disappear.

Among weapons, the AH–64A Apache attack helicopter armed with 

AGM–114 Hellfire missiles belied its reputation as an overly complex,

breakdown-prone system. The Apache proved a highly effective tank 

killer. The multiple launch rocket system and Army tactical missile 

system demonstrated great effect against entrenched enemy and in 

counterbattery missions in their own right. When combined with the 

Firefinder device to locate the source of enemy fire, the rocket and

missile systems suppressed Iraqi artillery fire quickly and permanently.

Because of the Firefinder advantage, enemy batteries were rarely heard

from in the XVIII Airborne Corps’ sector after the first two days of the

conflict, a great relief to Army commanders concerned about one of the

few advantages of the Iraqis—the greater range of their newer artillery. 

The older mainstays of U.S. Army artillery, 155-mm. and 8-inch (203-

mm.) pieces, underlined their well-founded reputations as accurate and 

dependable direct-support systems.

Just as impressive as the high-technology Army inventory at the 

beginning of the crisis in late 1990 was the ability of American defense 

agencies to answer demands from the U.S. Central Command for new 

products. A dramatic example of this response capability came in the 

days before the ground war. The successful coalition counterattack on 

the city of R’as al Khafji in the first week of February was marred when

American support fire killed severalCENTCOM troops. Fratricide proved

a recurrent problem during Desert Storm, as units could precisely engage 

at ranges greater than they could precisely identify. General Schwarzkopf 

ordered accelerated research on antifratricide methods. A joint research 

team, coordinated by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, 

immediately went to work on the problem of making American vehicles 

and positions visible only to American armored vehicles and aircraft. 

Just nineteen days later, Central Command distributed the results of the 

agency’s work: On the Army side of the research effort, the Center for 

Night Vision and Electro-Optics at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, came up with 

the Budd Light and over twenty other solutions to the problem, some of 

which were fielded before the end of the war.

Third, American soldiers outperformed their Iraqi enemies. Particularly 

gratifying to higher-echelon commanders was the conduct of personnel 

in the all-important middle-level action positions: junior officers and
66

noncommissioned officers. These were the lieutenants and sergeants who

took the initiative to lead convoys across dangerous desert expanses at night 

to resupply the advance; found and engaged thousands of enemy tanks 

and positions in the confusion of heavy rains and blinding dust storms; 

and, when called for, treated a defeated enemy with dignity and care. As 

General McCaffrey observed of his junior officers and noncommissioned

officers during the 24th Infantry Division’s dash to the Euphrates River

valley, “They could have done it without us.”

The impressive overall performance notwithstanding, problems 

requiring postwar attention did occur. Several types of equipment drew 

criticism from commanders. American field radios proved unreliable,

and commanders who had the opportunity to try British-made Iraqi 

radios pronounced them superior. Fortunately, the initiative of key 

commissioned and enlisted personnel at the battalion and company 

levels bridged communications gaps at crucial times. In a curious split 

decision on a weapon, the M109 155-mm. self-propelled howitzer won 

praise for fire effect on targets, but its chassis proved too underpowered

to keep pace with mechanized and armored assaults. One piece of combat 

engineer equipment earned similar criticism. The M9 armored combat 

earthmover cut through berms easily but could not keep up with assaults 

over open terrain.

Despite its brevity, the 100-hour Persian Gulf War lasted long enough 

to update an age-old postwar lament, criticism of the supply effort. This 

time, the speed of the advance exposed a shortcoming: helicopters, 

tanks, and Bradleys outdistanced supply trucks. Lifting fuel tanks and 

ammunition pallets by helicopter provided a quick fix, but choppers

carrying fuel gulped it almost as fast as they delivered it. If the ground 

war had lasted longer, General Schwarzkopf would have had to halt the 

advance to fill forward operating bases. On the morning of 27 February,

as the VII Corps prepared to complete the destruction of the Republican 

Guard Forces Command, the 1st and 3d Armored Divisions’ tanks were 

almost out of fuel.

After isolating and evaluating various aspects of Army operations 

and systems, questions remained about the overall course of the war and 

its outcome. Was the Army really as good as the overwhelming victory 

and one-sided statistics of the war suggested? Was Iraq’s military really 

that weak? Complete answers awaited more careful analysis of the 

combatants; but in the immediate aftermath of the ground campaign, two 

conclusions seemed justified.

First, Iraq’s military was not prepared for a war of rapid movement 

over great distances. The Iraqis, in their most recent combat experience 
67

against Iran, had developed skills at slow-paced, defense-oriented 

warfare. Those skills proved inadequate to stop a modern army with 

high-speed armor capabilities and total control of the air.

Second, the U.S. Central Command used its air-land warfare to 

devastating advantage. With air supremacy established more than a month 

before the ground war began, the success of General Schwarzkopf’s 

corps-size envelopment to the west was assured. The relentless day and 

night pounding of aerial bombardment made easier the task of even those 

coalition units not in the envelopment, for when they attacked straight 

ahead into Iraqi positions, they often found enemy units less than 50 

percent effective. Ground attacks forced enemy attempts to reposition, 

which in turn exposed them to air attacks while moving. The combination of a powerful air offensive and a fast-moving armor-heavy ground 

campaign proved devastating in the desert environs of Southwest Asia.

Americans reasonably expected to win the war with Saddam Hussein 

but nevertheless were surprised by the speed of the victory and its low 

cost in coalition lives. The Americans had suffered one hundred fortyeight battle deaths and their allies another ninety-nine, versus something 

upwards of twenty thousand for the Iraqis. Another sixty thousand 

Iraqis were wounded or captured. This result can be explained largely 

by the superb equipment, rigorous training, and professional character 

the coalition armed forces brought to the fight. The epitome of these

qualities was the evermore professional American soldier, thoroughly 

trained to make the absolute best use of the most modern equipment. 

The operational scheme for Desert Storm was well thought out and 

capitalized on coalition strengths while playing upon Iraqi weaknesses. 

Never before had American forces been more fully prepared for a war 

they were called upon to fight. The Army that had recovered its balance

in the 1970s and trained so hard in the 1980s had done all that was asked 

of it in the desert in 1991.

Epilogue

American forces had rapidly deployed with very little warning to 

fight on a distant and unexpected battleground. In the aftermath of the

Cold War, this seemed to be the shape of things to come. The Army faced 

the daunting task of redesigning itself after the close of Desert Storm

to meet global challenges while reducing its active component from 

seven hundred seventy-two thousand in 1989 to five hundred twentynine thousand in 1994—with commensurate cuts in the National Guard 

and Army Reserve. Initial efforts to make this small force more mobile 

to meet the continuing challenges of expeditionary warfare focused on 
68

expanding sealift, airlift, and the infrastructure that complemented them. 

These initiatives were soon followed by the establishment of stockpiles 

located in selected areas, called pre-positioned stockpiles, close to likely 

trouble spots overseas. Over time, these initiatives also included efforts 

to change the nature, in particular the weight, of the forces being moved. 

Improved strategic mobility would be the product of strategic lift, prepositioning, and transformed forces.

As effective of a deployment as Desert Shield had been over the 

course of the four-and-a-half months before major combat operations 

began, it retrospectively seemed frenzied and ad hoc to those who had 

participated in it. Convenient roll-on/roll-off (RO/RO) shipping was not 

sufficiently available to accommodate the huge mass of vehicles being

moved. Break-bulk shipping, requiring cranes and heavy equipment to 

offload, was more plentiful but required considerably more time in port.

It took extraordinary efforts to keep track of supplies and equipment 

in international shipping containers, and maddening delays resulted 

when recordkeeping broke down. Units in Saudi Arabia too often found 

themselves piecing together their hardware first from one ship and then

from another, rummaging through hundreds of containers to find items

they had lost track of, or pursuing supplies and equipment that had 

been unloaded from the ships but then wheeled past them to the “iron 

mountains” of supplies building up in the desert. The hasty preparations 

for war in a distant theater were a far cry from the methodical long-term 

preparations that characterized major Cold War plans.

An obvious firststep to solve some of the issues of rapid deployment

was to procure more shipping, particularly roll-on/roll-off shipping 

capable of accommodating battalions or brigades at a time. Sealift in the 

Maritime Administration’s Ready Reserve Fleet expanded from 17 RO/

RO ships in 1990 through 29 in 1994 to 36 in 1996. Expanding sealift was 

accompanied by corresponding improvements in infrastructure and training. During Desert Shield, many divisions deployed through seaports 

they had not contemplated for that purpose and others did so through 

facilities that were antiquated or in poor condition. By 1994, a massive 

$506 million deployment infrastructure refurbishment plan was under 

way, investing heavily in port facilities, railheads, and airfields to speed

departing units on their way. The lion’s share of this expenditure went 

to such high-profile troop establishments as Fort Bragg, North Carolina,

for airborne forces; Fort Campbell, Kentucky, for aviation; Fort Stewart, 

Georgia, and Fort Hood, Texas, for heavy forces; and Fort Bliss, Texas, 

for air defense. Training budgets adapted as well to ensure that units 

were proficient with respect to deployment processes. In 1994 alone,
69

$26 million went to Sea Emergency Deployment Readiness Exercises 

(SEDREs) wherein combat units raced to port, loaded themselves onto 

ships, and deployed into a training event featuring some combination 

of amphibious, over-the-shore, and through-port entry into a selected 

battlefield. National Training Center scenarios began featuring a speedy

tactical draw of vehicles and equipment such as might be the case when 

marrying troops with hardware previously shipped or pre-positioned. By 

the mid-1990s, rotations to draw battalion sets of equipment in Kuwait 

and then train in the Kuwaiti desert offered further expeditionary training 

as part of the long and drawn-out campaign to contain the still-standing 

Saddam Hussein. The Army was preparing itself to be an agile and 

powerful expeditionary force.

The disposition of pre-positioned equipment for U.S.-based units 

adjusted to the new realities. During the Cold War, such equipment had 

been stockpiled in division sets in Germany and the Benelux countries. 

In annual Reforger exercises, troops from the United States flew to

Europe, drew and manned that equipment, and rolled out to training areas, 

thus demonstrating their capability to rapidly reinforce NATO. During 

the 1990s, this capability dispersed more broadly, with a total of eight 

brigade sets spread through Europe, Korea, Kuwait, Qatar, and afloat.

The set of equipment pre-positioned afloat in the Indian Ocean offered

the most flexibility. It consisted of a brigade set of two armored and two

mechanized infantry battalions with a thirty-day supply of food, fuel, and 

ammunition aboard sixteen ships, of which seven were roll-on/roll-off. 

Collectively considered, the sets in Kuwait, Qatar, and afloat could have

positioned a heavy division into the Persian Gulf in days rather than the 

month plus of Desert Shield. By the mid-1990s, the expeditionary intent 

of the Army proposed a capability to deploy five-and-a-third divisions

into a theater of war within seventy-five days.

Deployment on such a scale would require reliance on the reserve 

component as never before. The post-Vietnam force structure had located 

major elements of the combat support and combat service support upon 

which the active component depended in the Reserves and National 

Guard. During Desert Storm, when active-duty strength was 728,000; 

that of the Reserves 335,000; and the National Guard 458,000, 39,000 

Reservists and 37,000 National Guardsmen were called up to support 

a total force of 297,000 deployed to Southwest Asia. With the active 

force reduced to 529,000 and still falling in 1994, and the Army budget 

decreased from $77.7 billion in 1990 to $63.5 billion in 1994, reliance 

on the reserve component early on during major deployments became 

even more critical. The relative size, composition, balance, and roles of 
70

the active and reserve components would remain an important aspect of 

Army deliberations throughout the 1990s and beyond.

A major consideration with respect to strategic mobility was the 

logistical footprint of forces once deployed. American heavy divisions 

had gotten into the habit of accumulating huge depots, called iron 

mountains, of spare parts and supplies of all types in their immediate rear 

“just in case” they might need it. Without reliable means for precisely 

tracking and quickly delivering specific repair parts, they had no other

options. During the 1990s, information technology advanced to the point 

that it seemed possible to radically reduce the need for these stockpiles. 

Required materials might be delivered “just in time” as they were 

needed rather than hoarded in advance. Emerging technologies offered 

the promise of helping to provide visibility of supplies and repair parts 

as they moved through the supply and transportation networks with 

the use of bar coding, satellite communications, and GPS monitoring. 

Other technical advances, including embedded vehicle diagnostics, 

greater fuel efficiency, and on-board water-generation systems, held out

future hope of further reducing the amount of supplies needed on hand. 

The expectation of rapid deployment would become a way of life for 

thousands of servicemen and women in the United States and overseas; 

and the material means to support that way of life became increasingly 

available as the decade progressed.

The experience of Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm was 

to prove a harbinger of an active decade ahead of deployments to northern 

Iraq to rescue the Kurds, to Somalia to attempt to rescue the starving 

from their own corrupt warlords, to Haiti, and to Bosnia. Meanwhile, 

those same forces regularly redeployed to Kuwait in a series of rapidresponse exercises (nicknamed by some commuter containment) to 

maintain a watch on the resilient and dangerous Saddam Hussein. Those 

deployments were to be followed in the first year of the new millennium

by the start of a series of global operations against a new enemy: the 

shadowy terrorists of al-Qaeda and fellow extremists. Operations were to 

be launched to a number of regions and nations across the globe against 

those who supported the use of terrorism in general and not just those 

who harbored al-Qaeda. One of those operations, starting in March 2003, 

was to return to the Persian Gulf region in force to settle, once and for 

all, with Hussein.
71

Abbreviations

ACR armored cavalry regiment

ARCENT U.S. Army Central Command

AWACS airborne warning and control system

CENTCOM U.S. Central Command

CNN Cable News Network

CS combat support

CSS combat service support

FOB Forward Operating Base

GDP general deployment plans

GPS global positioning system

JFC Joint Forces Command

KTO Kuwaiti Theater of Operations

MARCENT U.S. Marine Central Command

MEB Marine Expeditionary Brigade

MEF Marine Expeditionary Force

MLRS multiple-launch rocket system

MSR Main Supply Route

NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization

NTC National Training Center

OPFOR opposing force

REFORGER Return of Forces to Germany

RO/RO roll-on/roll-off

SEDRE Sea Emergency Deployment Readiness Exercise

TOW tube-launched optically tracked wire-guided

USAREUR United States Army, Europe

73

Map Symbols

Airborne Division (Air Assault)

Armored Cavalry Regiment (ACR)

Airborne Brigade

Armored Division

Infantry Division (Mechanized)

Marine Expeditionary Brigade (MEB)

101st Airborne Division (Air Assault)

3d ACR

2d Brigade, 82d Airborne Division

3d Armored Division

1st Infantry Division (Mechanized)

5th MEB

Examples

X X

I I I

X

X X

X X

X

5

X

X X

101

I I I

3

X

2 82

X X

3

X X

1

75

Further Readings

Bourque, Stephen A. Jayhawk!: The VII Corps in the Persian Gulf War.

Washington, D.C.: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 2002.

Schubert, Frank N., and Theresa L. Kraus, gen. eds. The Whirlwind War: 

The United States Army in Operations Desert Shield and Desert

Storm. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 

1995.

McDonnell, Janet A. After Desert Storm: The U.S. Army and the 

Restoration of Kuwait. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Army Center of 

Military History, 1999.

Scales, Robert H. Certain Victory: The United States Army in the Gulf 

War. Washington, D.C.: Office of the Chief of Staff, 1993.

Stewart, Richard W., gen. ed. American Military History, vol. 2, The 

United States Army in A Global Era, 1917–2008, Washington, D.C.: 

U.S. Army Center of Military History, 2010.

Swain, Richard M. Lucky War: Third Army in Desert Storm. Fort 

Leavenworth, Kans.: Command and General Staff College Press, 

1994.
PIN : 909253–000