What if gulf war

Back then, there were reasons to be optimistic. One of them related to the cooperation — unseen up to that point — between Americans and Russians. Despite Iraq having been one of its main cold war clients in the region, the Soviet Union quickly endorsed the US-led military operation. Yet speaking in October , Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev underlined that:. One of the last acts of the US presidency of Donald J. Trump involved pardoning four Blackwater security contractors. These were responsible for the Nisour Square massacre, a shooting that killed 14 Iraqi civilians, including nine-year-old Ali Abdul Razzaq.

UN human rights experts condemned the presidential pardon as an affront to international justice. Well-integrated joint operations tied platforms, units, and actions together to create multiple dilemmas for the Iraqi military.

Perhaps most importantly, the United States demonstrated restraint and avoided the temptations of fighting past the culminating point of victory.

Given the relative ease with which Iraqi forces were defeated and ousted from Kuwait, some U. The U. Many saw it as a revolution in military affairs. American capabilities in space also played a crucial role for long-range communications and a satellite-based global positioning system that made it possible to navigate easily in trackless desert.

The United States failed to construct a durable regional security order after the war. What appeared to be an exceptionally daunting undertaking to simply defeat Iraqi forces in the theater of operations led to an overcautious approach to warfighting. The cautious approach included several weeks of airstrikes before launching the ground attack; insufficient recognition of Iraqi shortcomings especially after the major Iraqi attack at Khafji in late January ; a relatively slow-moving, deliberate main attack that was difficult to accelerate; and a mismatched approach to war termination that came up short on key military objectives both geographically failure to close off the Iraqi retreat route and operationally in not destroying the Republican Guard.

According to National Security Directive 54, dated Jan. Iraq freed American hostages seized in the conquest of Kuwait before the conflict and then released U. Combat operations were effective in evicting Iraqi forces from Kuwait and restoring Kuwaiti sovereignty.

But regional stability in the Persian Gulf? What would sufficiently represent achievement of that objective? Before combat operations, key supporting goals included elimination of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons and destruction of the Republican Guard Forces Command.

Combat alone was not enough to attain key policy aims. The intervention of the U. Eventually, the United States declared northern and southern no-fly zones and stationed U. The United States also worked through the United Nations to establish an intrusive inspection regime to ferret out and monitor weapons of mass destruction programs and to promulgate the continuation of economic sanctions on Iraq to force compliance with U.

There were important second-order effects to military operations that continue to play out. The conventional armed forces built primarily to fight numerically superior Soviet forces proved extremely effective against Iraq. For Americans, the realization that U.

Other states and their armed forces quickly distilled their own lessons from the Gulf War. Several developed asymmetric conventional strategies to counter the United States. High among these efforts are Russian concepts of hybrid warfare and Chinese concepts of unrestricted warfare that include major components of competition and conflict below the threshold of war as well as heightened emphasis on new technologies e. This is the area that poses the greatest contemporary challenge for the United States.

Russia and China have had time to close the gap with the United States in major areas of modern warfare. In particular, they have developed long-range precision strike systems such as anti-ship missiles, anti-aircraft systems, and other capabilities to thwart U. As a result, developing nuclear weapons could offset this disadvantage.

India , Pakistan , and North Korea all joined the nuclear weapons club after the Gulf War, while Iran accelerated its nuclear activities. Osama bin Laden and his followers cited the U. Learn about service in Afghanistan and Gulf War Illness. Your illness or condition must also meet the requirements of the time periods listed below.

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