The Gulf War showed the world the strength of the United States and became the starting point for China's understanding of modern warfare.
During World War II, all countries became aware of a vital resource: oil. Whether it's a fuel vehicle on land, a steel ship on the ocean, or even a metal giant bird in the sky, oil is needed.
Whoever holds the oil will hold the lifeblood of the world, especially in the era before the emergence of new energy. In the end, the United States, by virtue of its unique geographical location, emerged as the winner.
The smallest but strongest country in the capitalist world seized the last stretch of capitalist primitive accumulation in the twentieth century and saved its own country from the ravages of war.
After World War II, the United States rose rapidly, and its economic strength, industrial output value, reserves, steel production, and oil production all occupied the forefront of the world. However, at the end of the last century, a small Middle Eastern country challenged the oil hegemony of the United States, triggering the Gulf War that shocked the world.
For China, this war was a precious education in modern warfare, and at the same time, it also left a regret for an international friend. So, who is this small Middle Eastern country?
Why is China and the world shocked by this?Who is this international friend who died heroically?
After the Yalta Conference, Roosevelt** made a special trip to Saudi Arabia to visit Abdul Aziz, the founding king of Saudi Arabia who had signed an oil exploration agreement with the United States before the war, and his name was better known as Ibn Saud.
On the cruiser "Quincy", where Roosevelt stayed, Ibn Saud set up a king's tent on the deck and had a cordial conversation with Roosevelt. Before leaving, Roosevelt gave Ibn Saud his own wheelchair, and Ibn Saud gave Roosevelt his own cane in return.
In the exchange of gifts between Ibn Saud and the leaders of the two countries, the United States laid the groundwork in the Middle East. However, the Middle East has been in a state of ** since the thirteenth century AD, and the new nation-state movement that began in the twentieth century did not bring unity to this region.
After the Ottomans were driven away, the British reappeared. The bearded Arabs are too busy with foreign affairs to unify the entire Middle East.
After World War II, although the United States had a strong military presence in the Middle East, it was indifferent to the religious issues and regime change of the Arabs, and as long as it did not affect the delivery of oil, whoever was in power was acceptable.
Thus, in the five Middle East wars from 1948 to 1982, Israel was unrivaled in the Arab world, all of which were the result of the backing of the United States.
The United States needs a strong ally in the Middle East to warn the Arab countries of who is the real leader in the region.
In the early days of the Iran-Iraq war, Iraq's Saddam Hussein was bent on regional hegemony with the goal of becoming a leader in the Middle East. Iraq is rich in oil, while its neighbor Iran has strained relations with the United States, and the success of Iran's Islamic Revolution in 1979 has made it firmly anti-American.
In contrast, the United States would naturally choose to support Iraq. Through careful comparison, it is not difficult for us to find that during the Iran-Iraq war, the attitude of Western societies led by the United States towards Saddam's regime was very tolerant.
Although Iraq had already begun using large-scale chemistry during the Iran-Iraq war, the Iranian people did not portray Saddam as a heinous butcher, as the United States later launched its attack on him.
The Iran-Iraq war lasted eight years, from 1980 to 1988, and if it had not been for the Gulf War two years later, the Iran-Iraq war would have become a typical example in World War II textbooks.
Two years later, the Gulf War lasted only four months, making the eight-year-long Iran-Iraq war a complete negative teaching material, proving the truth of "fighting a low-level war at a high level".
The prince died in battle, and the final result of the Iran-Iraq war was that both countries were hit hard, the domestic people's livelihood withered, the economy stagnated, and the treasury was squandered, unable to buy high-tech**, and finally an armistice agreement was reached.
On August 20, 1988, the Iran-Iraq war officially came to an end. After the war, Iraq began to negotiate loans with other countries of the same faction. During the war, Iraq accumulated a large amount of national debt, so after the war ended, they wanted to be able to reduce oil production in order to increase oil ** and thus get more profits to pay off their debts.
Kuwait is one of Iraq's major creditors, but Kuwait has reduced oil production, resulting in international oil prices**, in an attempt to force Saddam to resolve the border issue between Iraq and Kuwait.
Unbeknownst to Kuwait, however, Saddam Hussein had set his sights on his own fine seaport. Prince Fahd of Kuwait, who is also the crown prince, has deep ties to China, where he lived and is affectionately known as the Eighth Prince.
Prince Fahd not only participated in the Gulf War in 1990, but also promoted a major event in China, the 11th Asian Games. As the president of the Olympic Council of Asia, he openly supported Beijing's hosting of the 1990 Asian Games in 1983, and brought his wife and daughter to China twice to express his support for Beijing and was willing to persuade countries that were unwilling to come to China to compete.
He also said that he would personally deliver a speech on the opening day of the Asian Games. However, on September 22, 1990, the Asian Games in Beijing opened, and on August 2, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.
The fighting of the Iraqi army in the Kuwaiti capital lasted only five hours before three army divisions reached the outskirts of the Kuwaiti capital. Fourteen hours later, Iraq completely occupied Kuwait City, the capital of Kuwait.
King Emir Jaber III of Kuwait fled to Saudi Arabia, and the youngest brother, Prince Fahd, and his two sons remained in Kuwait City, where they led the Kuwaiti Janissaries to resist for three days before dying in the royal palace.
For the first time since World War II, a country was annexed. Saddam Hussein claimed Kuwait as Iraq's nineteenth province and continued his westward expansion, targeting Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia urgently dispatched reinforcements from the U.S. "Desert Shield" program, using missile launchers on the DF-3.
Saddam's annexation of an independent state is a provocation to the post-World War II international order, and if he continues to defeat Saudi Arabia, he will control 40% of the world's oil production, and the United States will never agree to it.
On August 7, the U.S. team officially arrived in Saudi Arabia. Subsequently, after a series of diplomatic battles, on January 17, 1991, the US-led multinational forces began to bomb Baghdad, Operation "Desert Storm" began, and the Gulf War broke out.
Saddam Hussein deployed three lines of defense in Kuwait, with a total of 42 divisions, about 540,000 troops, more than 7,000 tanks and armored transport vehicles of various types, and 2,800 artillery pieces.
In the country, there are also a total strength of about 660,000 troops, a total of 1.2 million troops. The US-led multinational force has about 690,000 troops, 9,300 tanks and armored vehicles of various types, and 1,740 combat aircraftTwo hundred and forty-seven warships and nine aircraft carriers.
Saddam Hussein attempted to fight a World War II-style homeland offensive and defensive war in Kuwait, but the multinational coalition flew directly into Baghdad, the capital of Iraq, through the air. Even before the coalition air force took off, the information jamming and radar jamming initiated by the United States had blinded Iraq's air defense system.
The Iraqi capital was hit by an air raid, and thousands of warplanes flew swaggering in Iraq's airspace to launch guided missiles, and Baghdad's organs and industrial nodes instantly turned into a raging sea of fire.
Satellite maps of Iraq, obtained through military and commercial satellites, directly locate military bases and deliver air strikes. "Desert Storm"The operation lasted 42 days, and all Iraqi ** institutions were paralyzed, oil industry facilities were destroyed, road traffic and other infrastructure were severely damaged, and information and communications were almost completely interrupted.
During Operation Desert Storm, the U.S. Air Force was nervously pumping ground troops into the Middle East. In a single day, more than 300 large transport aircraft C141 and C5 were rapidly assembled in the Gulf region, and the volume of transportation at Saudi Arabia's Dhahran Air Base even exceeded that of the two 1949 Berlins during the entire "Desert Storm" period.
In addition, the US Navy has also launched 122 Tomahawk missiles in the Arabian Sea. The missiles evaded radar detection in ultra-low-altitude flight and flew at a speed of 800 kilometers per hour for an hour or two to accurately hit targets 1,000 kilometers away.
The 500,000 troops deployed by Saddam Hussein in Kuwait have also become lambs to the slaughter. All kinds of over-the-horizon fire strikes accurately removed one heavy firepower cluster after another on the three lines of defense.
The integrated air defense system, on which Saddam Hussein had high hopes, is useless under the information and electronic warfare of the US military. Thus, the Iraqi ground forces lost an average of one armored battalion per day under the air strikes of the US army.
After the destruction of Iraqi self-propelled artillery, Saddam had no choice but to order the missiles to be fired in any possible American direction. MiG fighters are waiting to be bombed at various airfields, because the runway and radar have been blown up, and the MiGs that take off sporadically cannot compete with the US forces that have already mastered air supremacy.
After the end of Operation Desert Storm, the Soviet Union offered to have Saddam withdraw his troops, but the United States refused. After all, it was 1991, and the USSR itself was in a difficult situation.
Although Saddam Hussein was heavily damaged by the multinational air force during Operation Desert Storm, he still firmly believed that ground forces were the key to the outcome of the war. However, the long-awaited reality of ground operations turned out to be unusually harsh.
The depleted uranium armor of the M1A1 tank made the T-72 tank's 125 smoothbore gun ineffective. And the Apache armed *** cruised in the near air, hunting the Iraqi Army's long-range anti-aircraft firepower was insufficient.
The Iraqi ground forces have already suffered a serious blow from the US Air Force and are on the verge of collapse at the touch of a button.
In just one hundred hours, Iraqi tanks were destroyed, and Kuwait's three lines of defense, as well as forty-two divisions, were completely cleared. This scene was spread all over the world by the advanced television at that time, and even the US military itself was **segmented** in a TV program.
* A U.S. Air Force commander points to a building on the screen and says, "This is the Iraqi Air Force command post, in Baghdad, and now we're going to destroy it."
The moment he said this, the buildings on the screen were blown up in smoke and dust, and disappeared without a trace.
The U.S. military disclosed on a television program that the multinational force had lost only 606 people in post-war statistics, of which 148 were killed, of which 35 were killed by friendly forces. Before the war, Iraq was the fourth military power in the world and the first in the Middle East, and its domestic GDP after the war was less than one-third of the pre-war period.
The number of ** in the war reached 100,000 people, of which about 20,000 died, 860,000 people were taken prisoner. In the last hours of the war, there were even formed tank companies that surrendered to the American troops.
The war resulted in direct economic losses amounting to $200 billion. It was generally a "war of attrition" and a "protracted war" at the time, but no one expected Iraq to lose so quickly in four months against the backdrop of a million soldiers and an eight-year Iran-Iraq war.
The United States has shown the world the power of modern warfare, showing that the firepower enhanced version of the large corps tactics after the end of World War II is outdated, the air force can become a decisive combat force, and the generation gap in tactics has begun to affect strategy.
In the nineties of the last century, the United States showed the world a new mode of warfare, which greatly shocked China. At the time, we thought we would be able to respond to U.S. military action in the same way as Iran, even if the results might not be satisfactory.
However, the equipment and integrity of the Iraqi army far exceeded our expectations, so that the US military easily defeated Iraq in the Gulf War by virtue of its information technology and high mobility.
At that time, Iraq's main battle tanks were more advanced than ours, not because Iraq lost quickly, but because the US military's combat methods were difficult for us to accept. At present, we have accepted the information-based combat method through various popular science information.
But at that time, this way of fighting was like a different dimension to us, and the gap was too big for us to accept. But we adjusted our direction in time and started playing catch-up.
Looking at the military reform after the Gulf War, the development of various national defense heavy weapons, and the continuous success of the space program, today's China is no longer the country that was shocked, although there is still a gap, but we are in the right direction, and the gap is constantly narrowing. In the future, we will compete in the galaxy, and China will definitely have a place.