U S Marines in the Gulf War 1990-1991 Liberating Kuwait

Description: U S Marines in the Gulf War 1990-1991 Liberating Kuwait. In August 1990, Iraqi military forces invaded the neighboring nation of Kuwait. The invasion was part of an expansionist foreign policy that Saddam Hussein had established a decade earlier when he invaded post-revolution Iran. The Iraqi invasion of Iran failed, degenerating into nearly a decade-long war of attrition, but Kuwait was an easier target. Kuwait had financed the Iran-Iraq War for Iraq but refused to forgive the debt, and Iraq accused Kuwait of stealing oil from the Rumaylah oil field. Much smaller than Iran in terms of population and geography, Kuwait had focused its foreign and defense policies on negotiation and compromise rather than military force; inevitably, the large Iraqi army quickly overwhelmed the small Kuwaiti armed forces. Inside Kuwait, Iraqi troops began wholesale pillaging as security forces acted to remove all those loyal to the Kuwaiti royal family. Iraq declared that Kuwait was now a province of Iraq, thus eliminating its debt and adding Kuwait’s extensive oil fields to its own. Saddam stationed conscript infantry divisions in Kuwait and began building extensive defenses along the Kuwaiti-Saudi border. While Saddam calculated the military balance between Iraq and Kuwait correctly, he underestimated the willingness of the world community, especially the United States and Great Britain, to intervene on Kuwait’s behalf. His invasion set the stage for a military confrontation that was larger in scope than any similar circumstance since World War II. Under President George H. W. Bush, the United States assembled a global Coalition of concerned nations, first to defend Saudi Arabia against further Iraqi aggression, then to eject the Iraqi military from Kuwait. Early in this Gulf War, American military commanders designated the operation to protect Saudi Arabia as “Desert Shield,” and the successive operation to free Kuwait as “Desert Storm.” These military operations were massive undertakings, and they highlighted the paradigm shift from superpowers in precarious equilibrium during the Cold War to American global hegemony in the 1990s. For the U.S. Marine Corps, the Gulf War was a test of its ability to perform quickly, under pressure, as advertised. A Marine expeditionary force was deployed rapidly and then reinforced, while two Marine expeditionary brigades were also deployed as the Marine Corps continued to support its peacetime commitments. Despite long months of tedium in the desert as the crisis played out, the Marines performed their duties with skill and élan, achieving a remarkable victory against the Iraqi Army in Kuwait and proving the Corps’ strategic concepts, most especially the value of the Maritime Prepositioning Force. The impact of the war on American defense policy and the confidence the Gulf War’s success gave to the Marine Corps continue to impact today’s national security debates. The author, Mr. Paul W. Westermeyer, joined the Histories Branch as a historian in 2005. Mr. Westermeyer is the author of U.S. Marines in Battle: Al-Khafji, published by Marine Corps History Division in 2008. He holds a bachelor’s degree in history and a master’s degree in military history from the Ohio State University. It was apparent very early that the Persian Gulf deployments of 1990 were of great historical significance to the Marine Corps, and in accordance with its mission, what was then the Marine Corps History and Museums Division began collecting and preserving evidence of the events for use by later historians. Command chronologies, oral histories, official records, and lessons learned reports were preserved in the Marine Corps Archives, providing the foundation for this official history of Marines in the Gulf War. During the war, the History and Museums Division deployed five

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End Time: 2024-02-10T20:25:14.000Z

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