The 1991 Gulf War was an epoch-making war: This war had a profound impact on the establishment of a new international order after the Cold War, and at the same time, the new characteristics of this war have brought many enlightenments to the military strategy, campaign tactics and army building of all countries in the world. On the eve of the imminent outbreak of war, Saddam Hussein was full of confidence. Saddam Hussein's self-confidence certainly had personal reasons, but it was not entirely arrogant, in fact Iraq was quite powerful at that time.
Iraq at the time had about 1 million regular troops and about 480,000 reserve troops, nearly 6,000 tanks, 3,700 artillery pieces, 7,500 armored vehicles, more than 700 combat aircraft, and Scud missiles. In addition, Iraq has the most complete modern integrated air defense system in the Middle East - its "KARI" air defense system includes: 4 regional air defense operation centers, 16 interception guidance centers, and more than 70 air defense command and reporting centers. Iraqi fighter jets, surface-to-air missiles and anti-aircraft guns form a three-dimensional firepower network that basically covers all airspace.
Such a huge family fortune made Iraq claim to be the world's third military power after the United States and the Soviet Union. The title of the so-called "third military power" may have been boastful, but at the time the size and armament of the Iraqi army was indeed the number one in the world. After 8 years of tempering in the Iran-Iraq War, the Iraqi army's actual combat experience is also quite rich. Saddam Hussein believes that the United States is indeed the world's number one power, but after all, its military strength in the Middle East is limited, and he can completely suppress it by virtue of the geopolitical advantage of local operations.
The so-called strong dragon does not suppress the head snake - before this, the two superpowers of the United States and the Soviet Union had been defeated by small countries such as Vietnam and Afghanistan, using the geopolitical advantages of local warfare. The military power of the United States, a superpower, is distributed all over the world, and iraq in the Middle East has gained superiority in military strength by virtue of its advantages in local combat. At the end of August 1990, when war was about to break out, Saddam Hussein said in a meeting with foreign leaders: "I know very well the technological superiority of the United States, especially air superiority."
At the same time, however, Saddam Hussein insisted that air combat could not play a decisive role, and that the final decision to win or lose the war was based on the decisive battle on the ground, or even the street battle with a close hand-to-hand bayonet, and in such a situation, the Iraqi side's superiority in troop strength and home combat could be fully released. Americans paid particular attention to war casualties: the Vietnam War was a wave of domestic anti-war because of the heavy casualties, which eventually forced the United States to withdraw from Vietnam. Before the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein boasted: "American society cannot afford the death of ten thousand soldiers."
Speaking to the army in September 1990, Saddam Hussein said: "You know that the Air Force cannot decide on a war on the ground ... This is the law that has been proven by all conventional wars and wars of liberation, and the last one proved is the Vietnam War." During this period, Saddam Hussein repeatedly threatened to turn the Gulf region into a "second Vietnam": if the United States were to intervene in Iraq's military operations in Kuwait, then the Iraqi army would let the Us military suffer the same fiasco in the Vietnam battlefield. However, when the war broke out, Saddam Hussein found that the war was no longer the familiar model.
Saddam Hussein, who thought that the U.S. military had little military power in the Middle East, had been dreaming of "a strong dragon without crushing the head snake", but he soon found that the military power of the US military in the Middle East was expanding geometrically: more than 300 C-141 and C-5S of the US military quickly assembled into the Gulf region, landing every 7 minutes at the Saudi Dharan Air Base, and the 22-day transportation volume exceeded the 11 months of Berlin airlift in 1949. At the same time, U.S. transport ships brought supplies from strategic bases around the world, and the capacity of three ships was equivalent to 3,000 C-141s.
More than 100,000 U.S. troops have been assembled in the Gulf region 30 days after sea-air and air transports. In the next 4 months, the US military continued to carry day and night, and finally more than 500,000 soldiers and nearly 2,000 main battle tanks were assembled, transporting 12 million tons of supplies! Saddam Hussein had thought that the U.S. military had little military presence in the Middle East, but the size of the U.S. military after mobilization was geometrically expanding: at that time, the U.S.-led multinational force deployed more than 1,200 combat aircraft at the air bases in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Cartel, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, and Digo Garcia.
In addition, three carrier battle groups cruise on maritime positions in the Mediterranean, Red Sea and Arabian Sea. By the time the war actually started, the United States had amassed a multinational force of up to 660,000 troops in the Middle East with 34 countries. Although Iraq used 860,000 troops in the Gulf War, the gap between the two sides is actually not obvious, and the factor that really determines the outcome of the war is no longer the strength of the two sides but their respective military technologies, and in the end, it is precisely the technological superiority occupied by the United States that defeats Iraq, which is slightly superior in strength.
The Gulf War was a landmark epoch-making war in the history of world wars -- the Gulf War changed the traditional mode of operation and enlightened all countries in the world in a new situation war. The biggest feature of the Gulf War is that it was a high-tech war. The U.S.-led multinational forces have widely used advanced technologies in this war. The Gulf War fully embodied the new models and characteristics of modern high-tech warfare, such as the integration of sea, land, air, and space, a high degree of informationization, and precision strikes. The Gulf War became a one-sided, crushing war under the premise of using conventional weapons.
Electronic warfare had an important impact on the course and outcome of the war: the electromagnetic superiority of the U.S.-led multinational force would be a new commanding height in the war; the Gulf War set a precedent for winning wars with air power as the mainstay. The use of a large number of precision-guided weapons in air strikes has improved the accuracy of air strikes and reduced civilian casualties to a minimum; in the Gulf War, the combat airspace has expanded unprecedentedly, the battlefield has developed in a large-depth, highly three-dimensional direction, and there is no obvious front and rear.
In this war, high-tech weapons have greatly improved their combat capabilities and enabled combat operations to develop toward high speed, all-weather, and all-time domains. Originally, people thought that the United States and Iraq had so many tanks and armored vehicles confronting each other to fight a modern version of the "Kursk Tank War", and Iraq even expected to use man-sea tactics to fight the US military in street battles, but until the end of the war, the large-scale ground war that people expected basically did not happen. Nine U.S. AH-64 Apache helicopter gunships destroyed two Iraqi early warning radar stations before the official military operation was launched.
Therefore, when the 8 F-117 fighters of the first echelon of the US military entered the empty hinterland of Iraqi airspace, the Iraqi side did not know it, thus allowing the US military to successfully carry out the "decapitation" operation of the Iraqi air defense system. At the same time, the U.S. military also used electronic combat aircraft to strongly interfere with Iraq's electronic equipment, thereby suppressing Iraq's command, radar early warning and intelligence systems. Under the tactical interference of the US military, the Iraqi army instantly became blind and deaf. The chaotic Iraqi army was left with only its share of beatings.
After the completion of the interference, the United States first came out with a series of powerful fighters, overwhelming missiles, and precision guided weapons: at about 3 a.m. on January 17, 1991, a U.S. F-117 dropped its first bomb, bombing an Iraqi interception guidance center in the south of the country. In the time since, more than 700 fighters have also carried out their own attacks on important targets such as the nodes of the Iraqi air defense system and the command structure. On the other hand, the US Navy launched a comprehensive strike against the Iraqi Navy at the same time as launching more than 50 Tomahawk missiles to attack power transmission and transformation equipment throughout Iraq.
This first round of air raids was followed by the second and third waves of F-117 air raids. Iraq's air defenses had largely collapsed by dawn the next day after a night of airstrikes. The remaining air defense units of the Iraqi army had to fight separately against the command structure that had been bombed to the ground. The troops who saw the sunrise the next day thought they could engage the Americans head-on, but they were greeted with more intense airstrikes. Iraq's radar nodes, power stations, command centers, etc. have been destroyed by the multinational force led by the United States, and Baghdad has lost contact with the outside world, and the coalition forces have firmly grasped air supremacy.
U.S. F-117 stealth fighter-bombers indiscriminately bombed over Baghdad. The F-117 is equipped with laser-guided bombs with high accuracy: one bomb can blow a large hole in a fortification; a second bomb burrows through the hole and destroys all the personnel and equipment inside. What is more crucial is that the Iraqi army can't "see" it at all, so it can only fight against the dark sky. After realizing the power of the U.S. anti-radiation missile attack, the Iraqi radar operator quickly reduced the number of radar boots, which left the surface-to-air missiles with blind launches.
Iraq's anti-aircraft missile system, two days after the start of the war, has largely ceased to function. The U.S. military then dispatched 700 conventional warplanes to bomb. The U.S. military commander was still a little nervous before leaving, after all, Iraq's anti-aircraft fire was so dense that it could be ranked all over the world. At that time, the U.S. military commander estimated that the loss rate of these aircraft would reach 10%, which means that at least 70 aircraft may not be able to return, but the U.S. military ultimately lost only one aircraft in this operation. At this time, the electronic jamming equipment of the US military has basically abolished the Iraqi radar, so the Iraqi missile radar is full of dense white spots.
After the start of the war, the US tankers alone dispatched as many as 300 times a day, refueling military aircraft day and night. In this way, the U.S. military commander also felt that the Iraqi airspace was too crowded to fly more aircraft at the same time. At the same time, U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf and Red Sea were not idle: 122 Tomahawk cruise missiles were fired — flying at ultra-low altitudes at speeds of more than 800 kilometers per hour to evade radar detection, and after flying for an hour or two, they accurately hit targets 1,000 kilometers away. The Iraqi MiG fighters had no chance to take off under the comprehensive crushing of the sea and air integration.
The airfield was blown up, the radar was blown up, and the Iraqi fighters could not succeed if they wanted to take off into the air. Even if only one or two Iraqi fighter planes were occasionally barely lifted into the air, they could not escape the fate of being destroyed by the densely packed American aircraft. It can be said that at this time, the sky of Iraq has been allowed to soar by the US military. The US military, which holds air supremacy, carried out an unprecedented "carpet bombing" of Iraq. The Multinational Force, led by the United States, used a variety of means, including space satellite reconnaissance, aerial reconnaissance, and ground reconnaissance, to intercept Iraq's radar, communications facilities, and electromagnetic wave signals and to analyze and process them through computers and intelligence analysts.
Due to the determination of the various parameters of the Iraqi army's command center, communications and radar system, the MULTINATIONAL force led by the United States has always been able to accurately strike at Iraqi military targets. The U.S. military preemptively destroyed most of iraq's military airfields, and many Iraqi warplanes were destroyed before they could take off. Of course, the Fighter planes that have been taken off by the Iraqi Army were also quickly shot down in front of the US F-15 and F-16. As for the huge ground forces of the Iraqi army, they do not even need the coalition forces to send ground troops to engage them.
The "Apache" helicopter gunship usually fires anti-tank missiles outside the effective range of the Iraqi ground anti-aircraft fire, thereby destroying the Iraqi tank armored vehicles while ensuring their own safety. The US military's aircraft, tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, and even individual weapons are equipped with night vision equipment such as infrared night vision devices, laser night vision devices, and infrared thermal imaging equipment, which enables the WEAPONS and equipment of the US military to play the same combat effectiveness at night as during the day, so that the US military can fight continuously day and night, strike the Iraqi army more effectively, and promote the process of campaign and combat faster.
Throughout the Gulf War, the United States used more than 50 military and commercial satellites of various types in 12 categories to form a strategic reconnaissance network, providing 70 percent of the strategic intelligence for the multinational force. The multinational force has assembled 2,790 modern fixed-wing aircraft, more than 1,700 rotary-wing aircraft (including more than 600 attack helicopters), more than 6,500 tank armored vehicles, and a large number of self-propelled guns, rocket launchers, and engineering and technical support vehicles. During the war, multinational forces comprehensively used anti-missile warfare, electronic warfare, psychological warfare, naval warfare, and other services to coordinate operations.
In contrast, Iraq's operational philosophy is entirely a product of another era: Saddam Hussein has always hoped to save the situation through ground warfare, but the tanks and armored vehicles that the Iraqi army is proud of have been blown up into scrap iron by American fighters, bombers and attack aircraft and their conventional bombs, laser-guided bombs, infrared missiles, etc. The U.S. Air Force destroyed Iraqi ground forces with unprecedented efficiency: Iraqi ground forces lost an average of 1 armored battalion per day. At the same time, Iraq's power stations, factories, bridges and other infrastructure have been blown up.
The bombardments continued week after week, and the intensity continued unabated. The power station in Basra, Iraq, was repeatedly bombed more than 12 times. Air power, which was never favored before the war, is now the protagonist of the show, and Saddam Hussein is completely helpless about it. It took only 38 days of all-round, all-weather bombardment by the United States to inflict heavy losses on iraqi troops. After 38 days of bombardment, Saddam's long-awaited ground war finally began, but it was not a war, but more like the unilateral massacre of iraqi troops by the US military.
Iraqi ground forces, which had suffered heavy losses in the previous 38 days of continuous bombardment, now found that the U.S. M1A1 main battle tank easily crushed their T-72 tanks in both firepower and range. The U.S. military helicopter gunships cruising around hunted and killed the Iraqi army at will, and even the US tanks and helicopters equipped with night vision devices in the dark did not give the Iraqi army any chance to breathe. The Iraqi ground forces, which had been bombed for 38 days, were on the verge of collapse: Saddam's proud ground forces withdrew from Kuwait after only 100 hours.
The defeated Iraqi army fled north along Route 6 between Iraq and Kuwait, and US Air Force aircraft and naval carrier-based aircraft flocked to drop rockets and bombs: first blew up the Iraqi army's vehicles at the head and tail, cut off their paths and retreats, so that the Iraqi convoy in the middle could not move, and instantly became the meat of the knife. The cluster bombs carried by the US A-10 attack aircraft can release dozens or even hundreds of submunitions, which can penetrate 125 mm thick armor, and the fragments after the explosion can kill and injure targets within the area of a football field.
Tens of thousands of Iraqi troops were thus killed on the road on the border with Iko. At that time, there was a pile of smoking vehicle wreckage on the road on the border of Iko every 50 meters. Throughout the Gulf War, the U.S.-led multinational force had an absolute advantage: 223 were killed, 697 wounded, and 13 captured. Of those, 148 Americans were killed. By comparison, more than forty divisions of the Iraqi army were destroyed, with casualties reaching 8.5 million to 100,000, while the Iraqi Navy was completely destroyed in this war. The Iraqi army lost more than two-thirds of its overall combat capability in the Gulf War.
The war caused direct economic damage of about $200 billion to Iraq. The U.S.-led multinational force forced Iraq to accept a ceasefire in less than two months with little use of ground forces. The price paid by the U.S. military was much smaller than that of the Iraqi army: 606 casualties (148 of whom were killed) in the battle. It also included 35 people who were wounded by friendly fire. In this war, the United States shocked the world with a new mode of warfare.
Before the Gulf War, the world's understanding of war was still stuck in the era of the steel torrent of World War II. The dominant tactic during World War II was "blitzkrieg". This tactic is to take the tank as the core on the offensive side, supplemented by the air force, artillery, infantry and other branches of the army, and to quickly break through the opponent's defensive position with the tank armor unit as the precursor to launch a pincer offensive when the battle begins, and in the process to achieve the encirclement of the enemy through infantry follow-up. The defenders must ensure that the logistics supply lines are not cut off, and then arrange defensive positions in layers to resist the opponent's attack.
Before the Gulf War, the torrent of steel had been the mainstream of world wars. The Battle of Stalingrad in World War II was typical of this tactic. After World War II, the United States experienced two defeated local battles: one was the Korean War and the other was the Vietnam War. In the Vietnam War, the North Vietnamese army negotiated with the U.S. army for a long time through guerrilla warfare, thus dragging the U.S. military into a protracted war, and as the casualties increased, it aroused strong opposition from the U.S. domestic public opinion, and finally the United States had to withdraw its troops from Vietnam.
Before the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein was bent on turning Iraq into a second Vietnam, but the United States in the 90s was different from the United States in the 70s: the U.S. military during the Vietnam War had not yet completed informatization. At that time, although the firepower of the US military was strong, it was difficult to achieve accurate strikes in its firepower projection, so if it wanted to completely eliminate the opponent, it could only carry out close combat with the other side, and this kind of operation often caused a large number of casualties in the US army. This is also the reason why Saddam Hussein was obsessed with fighting ground position warfare with the US military during the Gulf War.
Saddam Hussein was not the only one who had this idea, in fact, this idea was widely believed in by the whole world at that time. At that time, the world generally believed that to defeat such a well-equipped, powerful and well-trained army as the US army, it was necessary to drag the US army into close combat such as trench warfare, street warfare or guerrilla warfare to kill and injure the US military in large quantities. Saddam Hussein still tried to defeat the U.S. military through this traditional tactic in the Gulf War, but when the war broke out, he was shocked by the new mode of operation of the U.S. army.
It wasn't just Saddam Hussein who was shocked, in fact the whole world was shocked by the war. China, thousands of miles away, watched the war. When the war first began, the common prediction within the Chinese military was: "It will be a protracted war, a war of attrition" and "The Iraqi army can hold out in Kuwait for at least a year"... However, in just over a month, the Iraqi army was defeated. How can this not be shocking? After the end of the war, China once translated a large number of US military operating regulations and military reports, and invisibly began to refer to the other side's model and standards to build the army.
We can find the key role played by the Air Force in the Gulf War, and certainly not to ignore the role of other services. Although the Air Force played the lead role in this war, it could not achieve such an effect without the cooperation of other branches of the army. Advanced weapons are very important for modern warfare, but weapons are still operated by people after all, so the quality requirements for combatants are very high. In any form of war, man is ultimately at the core, after all, the dead cannot replace the living.
After the founding of New China, a relatively peaceful situation was generally maintained: After the founding of New China, the scale of the other wars except for the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea was very limited. There are many things we need to learn about modern warfare: what is particularly important is to change the traditional thinking of war - the army is no longer just the only key branch of the armed forces, but to establish a system of operations (especially the thinking and mode of information-based operations). Hundreds of seminars held at all levels of the Chinese military after the Gulf War have come to a conclusion: change!
Only by seizing the new military changes that have arrived can we win, and the changes begin with ideas. Before the Gulf War, the Chinese army continued the theory of "victory on the ground": "The final victory or defeat of the war depends on combat boots and rifles." Under this guiding ideology, "continental army doctrine" was formed: the army occupied a dominant position, and the development of the navy and air force was relatively lagging behind. After the Gulf War, the importance of the air force and navy began to be widely recognized, and joint naval and air operations and coastal defense operations became the focus of military research. The Operational Ideology of the Chinese Armed Forces thus began a comprehensive transformation.
After the Gulf War, China put a strong military in science and technology on the agenda. The Chinese military began to develop with high-tech warfare as its goal. In the Gulf War, the multinational force led by the US military relied on GPS-guided missiles and warplanes to directly fight iraq's millions of troops back to their old nests in 10 days. The Gulf War made China realize the importance of having an independent navigation system, so China launched the Beidou 1 system project in 1994. At 9:43 a.m. on June 23, 2020, the last global networking satellite of Beidou-3 was successfully launched at the Xichang Satellite Launch Center.
It is not only China that has been awakened by the Gulf War: the application of electronic information technology in the Gulf War is equivalent to a wake-up call for the world, and almost all the world's major powers are now competing to develop their own satellite navigation systems. At present, the satellite navigation system that can achieve global coverage in the world has four major systems: the US GPS system, the Russian GLONASS system, the EU Galileo system, and the Chinese Beidou system. Japan and India also have their own satellite navigation systems, although the satellite navigation systems of Japan and India do not yet achieve global coverage.
South Korea has also developed its own navigation system plan: it is expected to build an autonomous navigation system by 2034. The weight of the nation cannot be controlled by man. It's not just that we understand this, it's actually all over the world. The development of their own navigation system is the need for scientific and technological strength, industrial production capacity as a support, so far the world even South Korea a total of only seven in the development of their own navigation system, so far only six have been successfully developed, has achieved global coverage capacity of only four, but the development of independent navigation system has become a common trend in major industrialized countries.
Looking back at the Gulf War now, we will find that this is indeed an epoch-making war: before that, the mainstream of world wars was still the steel torrent model since World War II; after the Gulf War, the guidelines for army building in all countries in the world were generally transformed into a new type of war based on winning high-tech conditions. Although everyone is aware of this problem, their respective economic levels are not the same, the military strength is different, and the research and development capabilities are different, so there are not many countries that can really keep up with this wave of transformation.