“Gulf lesson one is the value of air power… (it) was right on target from day one… Our air strikes were the most effective, yet humane, in the history of warfare.”
President George Bush, 29 May 1991
The most important lesson of the second Gulf war is that a small group of guerrillas, armed with the right strategy, can keep a nation in perpetual failure.
Iraq’s Baathists did learn lessons from the first Gulf war that altered their strategy for the second -- this is another demonstration that war is a contest of minds and to a lesser extent merely a clash of weaponry and formations on the field of battle.
1991’s Gulf War taught the Iraqi leadership that its military wasn’t a match for the US war machine. It would lose quickly and badly. Secondly, and less obviously, the first Gulf War taught the Iraqi leadership the power of systems disruption. The US air campaign during the first Gulf War was the first of its kind -- it completely shut down the functions of a semi-modern nation-state. For example:
- Oil and gasoline. 500 sorties and 1,200 tons of bombs were used to shut down Iraq’s oil and refining system. 80% of its refining capacity was directly impacted. The remaining 20% was preventatively closed to avoid damage. Iraq was left only with those fuel reserves produced before the war.
- Electricity. Attacks against Iraqi power production and switching facilities first shut down its effective use and then collapsed the entire system. This shutdown cascaded throughout the country as systems reliant on the national grid were forced to depend on unreliable ad hoc power generation.
- Telecommunications. The national telephone system was attacked on an ongoing basis. The ability to rapidly repair the network, its built-in redundancy, and numerous difficult to destroy wireless nodes forced the campaign’s planners into a series of repeated attacks to cause the needed disruption.
- Transportation. Numerous bridges, railroads, and roadways were interdicted to prevent the transportation of supplies and the normal functioning of the economy. Transportation connections from Baghdad to southeastern sections Iraq were successfully severed.
At the point when the first coalition ground forces entered Iraq (and Kuwait), Iraq was the hollow husk of a nation-state. All of its vital systems, necessary to support its status as a state let alone a state at war, were broken. As President Bush (see quote) and the entire world noted, the air campaign was devastatingly effective. However, this analysis misses the point. It wasn’t the air power that was so effective; it was systems disruption that accomplished the task. The devastation of Iraq’s infrastructure won the war before the ground invasion confirmed the process. The important thing to understand is that method of accomplishing this systemic collapse, air power, was coincidental to the outcome.