By the Rivers of Babylon

Saddam believing the United States had no stomach for a conventional war bound to produce heavy casualties in the tinderbox of the Middle East proved intractable. On the morning of January 17 1991 phase one of Operation Desert Storm—the air campaign of what the world would soon know as the Persian Gulf War—began. Desert Storm was the first major test of an all-volunteer U.S. military that had been rebuilt from the ground up following the debacle of Vietnam and the impact of that experience on the services was everywhere in evidence. From the point of view of doctrine and training the new American military eschewed protracted and messy insurgencies and inconclusive “operations other than war” in favor of conventional conflicts against regular armies. The new American military had been kitted out with a welter of new precision-guided weapons high-tech command-and-control information systems state-of-the art stealth fighter-bombers and Abrams tanks that could hit targets 2500 yards away while traversing rugged terrain in excess of 30 miles an hour with astonishing accuracy. In short the new American military possessed a level of speed mobility and striking power unprecedented in the history of warfare.