![]() Horner, was a hard-nosed fighter pilot who got along well with Schwarzkopf. Schwarzkopf drew his Air Force component from 9th Air Force, headquartered at Shaw AFB, S.C. On a day-to-day basis, CENTCOM consisted of a headquarters and planning staff in Tampa, Fla. As a theater commander, he was empowered by the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 to organize and employ his force as he saw fit, but the command had no forces of its own. It did not, however, include Israel, Lebanon, or Syria, which were watched over by the more prestigious US European Command. CENTCOM’s area of responsibility was the Middle East, Southwest Asia, and Horn of Africa. It would be conducted by US Central Command, which had grown out of the old Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force, formed in the wake of the Iranian hostage crisis and Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The Pentagon announced that the name of the operation was Desert Shield. 8, the Gulf saw the arrival of the first US forces-a USAF C-141 carrying an airlift control element, closely followed by F-15s from Langley AFB, Va., and elements of the US Army’s 82nd Airborne Division. 6, Saudi King Fahd accepted a US offer of assistance. ![]() In Washington, President Bush said the invasion of Kuwait “will not stand” and demanded that Iraq withdraw from Kuwait. Saudi defense forces were not sufficient to stop him. If he could seize the adjacent Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, he would, with his other holdings, control more than half of the world’s oil. Iraq had 63 ground divisions, 27 of them already in Kuwait and positioned to move south. It was not clear that he was going to stop there. Sometimes, the white paper said, the Air Force would function in a subordinate role, but “to meet the needs of the joint force commander, we conduct independent, parallel, and supporting operations in conjunction with other service components.” It predicted that the “use of military forces will be primarily in sharp, powerful, short duration operations,” with airpower playing a strong and early part. His treatise was entitled, “Into the Wild Blue Yonder: Should We Abolish the Air Force?”īucking the trend, the Office of the Secretary of the Air Force in June 1990 published a white paper, “Global Reach-Global Power.” It described the maturation of “a truly revolutionary set of technologies” and said the United States had become “an aerospace nation.” In the minds of many, the role of the tactical air forces was to support the Army in the “AirLand Battle.” In the Heritage Foundation’s Policy Review, Jeffrey Record, a noted defense analyst, asked whether the nation still needed an independent Air Force. Within two years, SAC would cease to exist. For most of its history, the service had been dominated by Strategic Air Command. Since its founding as a separate service in 1947, the Air Force’s prime mission had been to deter and counter the Soviet Union in the Cold War. The future looked particularly uncertain for the Air Force. A sarcastic headline in the New York Daily News said, “Pentagon Needs a Few Good Enemies.” ![]() The defense budget and force structure had been cut deeply, and there were demands for further reductions. The Berlin Wall had fallen in 1989, and both the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union were tottering. ![]() US armed forces were focused on the end of the Cold War. The oil crises of the 1970s had demonstrated the importance of the Middle East, but US defense strategy regarded it as a military theater of secondary importance, after Europe and the Pacific. State Department officials complained on the grounds that Iraq was not an enemy. The scenario was an Iraqi invasion of the Arabian peninsula. In late July, US Central Command featured Iraq-thinly disguised as “a country from the north”-in a command post wargame called Internal Look. The assessment did not change appreciably when Saddam, in a televised speech on July 17, threatened to take military action against Kuwait. Intelligence reports said that Iraq was “weary” from its long war in the 1980s with Iran and was not likely to attack its neighbors in Kuwait or Saudi Arabia. Despite the increasingly bellicose behavior of the Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the Central Intelligence Agency did not see Iraq as an urgent problem. In the summer of 1990, Iraq was the best-armed state in the Arab world.
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