Gulf War Thread

>Gulf War was 25 years ago
>25 years
>25
Gulf War thread anons, post comfy Gulf pics

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Finally, successful handling of enemies "retreating"
That'll teach the arab warrior.

I've always found it interesting that everybody, including the White House, was expecting this to be a much longer war. There were serious reports saying that the U.S. would be unable to treat all the wounded coming home because of insufficient space in hospitals to properly handle the expected flood of casualties that never came. Apparently, there was literal cheering in Pentagon when casualty reports started coming in and they were like 1/30 the predicted numbers.

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Because US always base their prognosis on the previous war they fought. They thought WW2 would be like WW2, that Korea would be like WW2, that Vietnam would be like Korea and Kuwait would be like Vietnam. In fact they didn't occupy Iraq precisely because they feared it would turn into Vietnam 2.0.

is he okay?

when you are in a state of war you do not let up as your enemy withdraws his forces

This is a stage prop

Vietnam lasted a long time but it was still a pretty low-intensity war in the grand scheme of things. What people were expecting during the lead-up to the Gulf War was a high-intensity conflict that would result in enormous casualties for NATO forces. Nobody thought that Saddam would win, but it was anticipated that containing him would be a long and bloody affair.

>when we anticipate a long war it's a short war
>when we anticipate a short war 'mission accomplished' it's a long war

Why don't people just give up trying to predict how the course of a war will evolve?

You need some sort of plan to coalesce around. An overarching doctrine informs your tradeoffs in what kind of army you build, what tech you buy with your defense budget, how many grunts vs. how many special forces you train, that kind of stuff.

Meanwhile, your planners can and do come up with alternatives for how things are expected to develop. Plus there are always people scattered throughout the military and the various bureaucracies pushing their own pet projects. The US might've started WW2 in a WW1 posture, but it had guys like Doolittle and Einstein innovate it in their own ways.

>You need some sort of plan to coalesce around. An overarching doctrine informs your tradeoffs in what kind of army you build, what tech you buy with your defense budget, how many grunts vs. how many special forces you train, that kind of stuff

Real life isn't a strategy game you muppet

What

>let's go to a war without any sort of plan or estimation of the outcome

He's right you knobgobbler. You need to have some kind of plan for everything from budgeting to allocating forces to a theater in the event of an outbreak of war. Yes, war plans are almost never correct in their assumptions, but the alternative is to be completely unprepared for anything.

I like that period where we just go and fight all these little piss-ant countries and pretend our military is still worth a shit. Oh man, Grenada, Panama AND Iraq? World shattering.

are you disabled, yes you try to plan logistics for war ahead of time, even at the most macroscopic level, so your budget and armed forces don't get fucked over

>what kind of army you build
>how many grunts vs special forces you train

The way he phrases this makes it sound like he's talking about Starcraft or some shit kek

Literally a non-war.

The Iraqis escaped mostly unscathed and the Americans hugely exaggerated enemy losses.

The real war was the civil war that followed and lasted a whole month of continuous intense urban combat between the Republican Guard and Kurdish/Shiite Islamist militias.

That was extremely brutal and had a far higher death toll and infrastructure damage than the Gulf """war""".
Source: my parents lived in Iraq at the time

> They thought WW2 would be like WW2

What did he mean by this?

>ywn use an M16A2 with an M203 grenade launcher
>ywn wear Desert Battle Dress Uniform
>ywn patrol the desert listening to classic 80s music

Just fucking kill me now.

Dumping Operation Desert Storm and Operation Restore Hope pics

Tell us Ba'athist-era Iraq stories Dune Coonanon

>Source: my parents lived in Iraq at the time
Wow, very credible.

And the Iraqis aren't known as a deceitful and underhanded people by all their neighbors either, unlike the Amerikkkans.

Gulf War I was literally the last time the US was worth a shit, it's been on a downhill slide for the past 20 years and fell off a cliff after 2001. Every major military action since the Gulf War has been one disaster after another.

Expect the next big war to end in a Imperial-Russia-in-WW1-tier fiasco that causes a Civil War.

You realize we're on an anime image board, right?

So Starcraft is literally the most accessible analogy available. Moreover I used modern archetypes because I and the person I was responding to were not discussing any one war (or even one nation. look at Saddam's Iraq vs. present-day Iraq, for example.).

>implying the initial conventional warfare stage of iraq 2003 wasnt a resounding success

>Dude discussing the merit of elite units is faggy lol
>He says while discussing the fucking gulf war

Have you even heard of revolutionary guards?

>the war fought in the middle of the desert didn’t matter
>the war fought in the towns did matter
>people who lived in the towns say so
Sorry bud, not a reliable source

using some context clues, it's probably a typo, they thought ww2 would be like ww1

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Imagine the heat with that gear ...

I'm told it happened in the CNN news room

I know, friend, it was a joke.