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.
During his experience in Afghanistan in the s, bin Laden saw how Soviet forces had ultimately succumbed to much less technically sophisticated opponents. Might such techniques of irregular warfare used against one superpower be fruitfully applied against the other?
Though not a failure, the Gulf War did not demonstrate U. The vulnerabilities of U. The demonstration of military prowess in the Gulf War included a problematic second-order effect for the relationship between the United States and some of its military allies.
Even the most developed nations were and are extremely hard-pressed to match the complex and often exquisite U. Few bothered to try. Instead, U. Furthermore, the absence of such capabilities also obviated the need for allies to develop the organizations to create and orchestrate the use of such exquisite capabilities.
American success in the Gulf War created, in part, a new expectation that the U. From a U. Personally, as an artillery captain with the U. I was satisfied that our unit had performed brilliantly and that we had helped successfully accomplish our mission.
After the Gulf War, I rose in rank retiring in as colonel and spent much of my military life as a strategist back in Iraq a couple of times, as well as tours in Korea, Afghanistan, and the Pentagon and as a faculty member at the U. Naval War College and U. Army War College. The United States has much to be proud of in its performance in the Gulf War. American officials aligned policy and strategy well in the run-up to the war; successfully integrated diplomatic, informational, military, and economic instruments of power; and triumphantly conducted joint military operations that exhibited mastery of new and even revolutionary military-technical capabilities.
In the immediate aftermath of the conflict, President George H. Menu Menu. A Short History of the Department of State. For more information, please see the full notice.
The First Gulf War Of all the policy successes during this era, the Department of State and President Bush are most clearly associated with the successful effort to roll back the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. President G. Three British soldiers in full combat and gas gear wait for the all-clear signal in a hotel lobby in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, during a Scud attack on February 26, The three wait under the portraits of the present and former Saudi monarchs.
This image may contain graphic or objectionable content. The body of an Iraqi soldier lies in a sandy ditch on the outskirts of Kuwait City on February 27, , after being killed as coalition forces moved in to liberate the city.
Somewhere in Iraqi desert, U. S soldiers guard captured Iraqi prisoners of war on February 25, A wounded Ken Kozakiewicz, left, cries after being given the dogtags and learning of the death of a fellow tank crewman, in the bodybag at right, in this February 28, photo.
The widely published photo came to define the Persian Gulf war for many. At right is wounded comrade Michael Santarakis. The soldiers were from the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division.
Residents of Tanuma in the Iraqi province of Basra stand guard over captured Iraqi military personnel in March of A satellite communications antenna destroyed during Operation Desert Storm.
General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, left, escorts Iraqi Lt. General Sultan Hashim Ahmad, third from left, with other Iraqi military leaders to a tent prior to the start of a meeting to set the terms for a permanent ceasefire.
The meeting took place at an airbase in Safwan, Iraq, on March 3, An Iraqi sits huddled in a barbed wire holding area at a U.
A long line of vehicles, including destroyed Iraqi Army Russian-made T tanks and trucks stand abandoned by fleeing Iraqi troops on the outskirts of Kuwait City, on March 1, , after the Allied troops liberated the capital of Kuwait. A devastated convoy of vehicles on a highway north of Kuwait City is visible in this aerial photo made on March 1, , during the Gulf War. Iraqi forces fleeing the city in every available vehicle were intercepted by allied forces and destroyed.
The bodies of dead Iraqi soldiers hang from a truck abandoned by fleeing Iraqi army on the road in North-Eastern Kuwait, leading to Iraq, on March 11, Several blown-out wells damaged by retreating Iraqi soldiers in Al-Ahmadi oil-field burn on April 1, , in southern Kuwait.
Iraqi troops retreating after a seven-month occupation, smashed and torched wells, badly polluting the atmosphere and creating crude oil lakes. In addition, up to eight billion barrels of oil were split into the sea by Iraqi forces damaging marine life and coastal areas up to kilometers miles away.
The effects of Iraqi troops setting fire to the oil wells in Kuwait during February , is captured in this near-vertical photograph of the northwestern end of the Persian Gulf taken on April 7,
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