Mike Glenn:
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Operation Desert Storm achieved its primary objective: Eject Iraqi forces from Kuwait and restore its government.
The war also validated the strategy and tactics the U.S. military had painstakingly learned since Vietnam. The Iraqi forces - so unsophisticated and linear in their thinking - couldn't cope with an opponent who would fight them in three dimensions.
Operation Desert Storm has sometimes been dismissed as a "push-button war." While the term is a slander against those of us who pulled triggers, U.S. military technology - like Stealth fighters and smart bombs - was generations ahead of anything employed by the Iraqis.
My cavalry troop was among those units to receive early-model Global Positioning System handheld receivers. While it was the size of a Tom Clancy novel and had only a tiny screen displaying the map coordinates, we gazed at our GPS with awe like the prehistoric apes contemplating the Monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Knowing your exact coordinates - thanks to a few satellites flying through space - certainly came in handy for land navigation in a region with few if any terrain features.
But the key to U.S. success in the Gulf War was never technological wizardry. We could have traded equipment with the Iraqis and still defeated them.
In the end, it was the superior quality of my fellow troopers in the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment and the other U.S. forces in the region that made victory possible.
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I think he is clearly correct. The Iraqi troops were outmatched in every phase of the war and equipment was just one of those phases.
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