Gulf War thread?
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You are currently reading a thread in /k/ - Weapons
Can someone please explain the strategy and tactics that were used in the gulf war?
The commanding general flew back to the US halfway through to do exactly that. The whole explanation is on YouTube. Look it up and get back to us with what you learned.
Be more specific in your questions op. As far as the history of warfare goes it probably remains the most mechanized confrontation recorded. Outside of the battle of Kuwait Airport, Khafji, and special recon missions of the 10th sfg very little infantry action occurred.
>>30600406
Bump
>>30600754
Id like to know more about the ground war (as opposed to the air campaign), how the ground forces moved, what positions they needed to take, where geographically the war took place, did the airwar happen over Kuwait or iraq, etc
>>30600406
Interesting tidbit: The Battle of 73 Easting validated the IFV concept of having anti tank capabilities.
Not sure if there's another one in the Bradley's reportiore.
>>30600801
watch jar head there you go thats what happened. or people walking around in the desert with stingers
>>30600801
>Id like to know more about the ground war (as opposed to the air campaign)
There's not much to the war if you neglect the air war. The original plan was to paralyze the Iraqi Army in Kuwait and then hit them with a frontal assault led by the Marines and Arab forces while the Frogs and US Army swung west around the desert to trap them in Kuwait.
However, the Iraqi Army was so battered by that point that they just collapsed faster than we expected. The planned assault into the teeth of Iraqi defenses instead ran into completely undefended positions and masses of surrendering men, and the Iraqis routed so quickly that the encirclement almost didn't work.
>>30600801
>did the airwar happen over Kuwait or iraq
Both. The air war had a bunch of different objectives that saw Coalition aircraft flying all over Iraq and Kuwait.
Iraq was hit because it was a necessary component for not just the strategic campaign, but for securing the airspace over Kuwait as well. Iraq had an impressive air defense network (actually designed and built by the French, IIRC) that broke the country into regional nodes that were centralized at Baghdad. That meant that the easiest way to knock out the air defense network was to hit the command and control stations in the capital.
To actually accomplish that, it required a weird mix of strikes. PAVE LOWs leading AH-64s would open up the campaign by knocking out early warning radars, allowing strike aircraft to cross the border west of Kuwait undetected. From there, they would spread out and hit strategic targets - mainly local command stations, airfields, and other elements vital to local air defenses. On a bigger scale, you also had F-117s, EF-111s, and Tomohawks targeting the capital itself to hit critical command components there. Because the Iraqis were so centralized, it was hoped that by knocking out the connection to Baghdad, local controllers wouldn't be able to respond in a timely manner. Even when they did try to respond, the local-level strikes did a good job at neutralizing air defenses at their source, so much so that the Iraqis would never put up any coordinated resistance in the air, nor would their SAM networks be able to operate efficiently.
If you're interested, I can elaborate more on the air campaign.
Also of note is the capability brought by the global positioning system. It seems that Saddam was not aware of its existence, which made the possibility of a wide left hook impossible.
Also, look up the great SCUD hunt. Due to the previous usage of American Sat sourced Intel from the Iran Iraq war, Saddam was able to conceal his forces and movements effectively. Well, save for that pesky JSTAR
Thus, large amounts of coalition assets had to be devoted to Eastern Iraq to hunt Israeli hating SCUD launchers with little success. Great SCUD hunt should be one if the first .PDF. On Google.
>>30603099
An old teacher of mine was an F-111 pilot in the Gulf. Can you elaborate more on the use of F-111s?
>>30603099
What do you know of Poohbah's Party!
>>30603119
>Can you elaborate more on the use of F-111s?
They were probably the some of the most important aircraft of the entire campaign.
EF-111s were used to fly jamming escort for most strike packages into Iraq, even after the Iraqi air force stopped being a thing, and they were even the only non-F-117 aircraft to fly over Baghdad.
Regular F-111s were also heavily used through the end of the war. Though they didn't get to see the glamorous SCUD-hunting job the F-15E had, they were still flying a lot of strategic strikes across the border, and they were an integral component of the interdiction campaign against the Iraqi army in Kuwait.
When they were training during Desert Shield, pilots noted that the PAVE TRACK pod they had could spot vehicles in the desert fairly easily, so they adopted a tactic that would be known as "tank plinking." An F-111 could carry eight PGMs on a single mission, and, with their long legs, they could orbit around until they'd found suitable targets. I forget the exact numbers, but the F-111s were killing quite a few tanks each night by just flying around until they found something to hit with a PGM. This also came in handy when they started the interdiction against the Iraqi Army. Once the bridges across the Euphrates were knocked out, the Iraqis began trying to ship supplies in across the desert at night. The F-111 could still see them, however, and they could hit the soft trucks just as well as they were those tanks.
Pic related shows just how bad things got for the Iraqis by the time the ground war started. Of course, the F-111 was only a part of that, but they were a major contributor.
>>30603195
>they could orbit around until they'd found suitable targets.
My teach described doing this, although he said there usually wasn't much of a wait. There were more targets then bombs most of the time.
He also mentioned something like after they destroyed the sewer lines in Mosul you could smell it from the air.
Lies of idiots stuck in techno-attritional 2GW.
Missiles can't hit a moving target
why was there so much friendly fire?
>>30600406
Strategy: bomb everything by air since Iraqi airforce was non existent. Then arty every pocket of resistance. There was no war of manuevers ala Tobruk in WWII. Just straight up turkey shoot.
>>30603411
>My teach described doing this, although he said there usually wasn't much of a wait
Well yeah when you've got one of the largest armies in the world holed up in a tiny country you're going to have no shortage of targets. It also had the added benefit of demoralizing the Iraqis - in the Iran-Iraq war, Iraqi tankers had gotten used to sleeping in their tanks for safety in case the Iranians launched a night attack. However, once the tank plinking set in, they suddenly were forced to sleep out in the open in slit trenches lest they get smacked by a PGM out of nowhere.
>>30604490
A lot of that had to do with how fast the front was moving. CAS zones were broken into sections of the front that had junctions wherever a unit was. Though these zones were placed several miles ahead of the forward-most friendly troops, when the Coalition forces were moving as fast as they were, it didn't take much to cause adjacent units to get separated by several miles.
Making that worse was the fact that this was a coalition, where there would be a variety of equipment on the friendly side instead of the same recognizable vehicles that they were used to training with. You also had the fact that much of the front was a featureless desert, so it was easy to lose your bearings (especially for those pilots flying something with simple navigational suites like the A-10).
>>30600406
If you're interested in learning more about the war, I recommend reading "Into the Storm" for the ground war and "Every Man a Tiger" for the air war. They're both "Tim Clancy" books, but they're writen by Fred Frank's and Chuck Horner respectively. They're both excellent reads.
>>30603455
I know right?!? Even worse is that I heard lesbian were flying some of the missions! Because of that, there was no way we could have won Desert Storm. Hey, you wanna drink some Samuel Adams with me my white friend?
>>30606196
Every Man a Tiger was really well done, though if you're looking for a play-by-play of the air war it might not be what you're looking for. Clancy and Horner did an excellent job covering a lot of points that generally aren't discussed, but they tend to gloss over the finer details apart from a couple of really notable missions.
Still something I'd definitely recommend though.
