Tag: Gulf War

The Desert Shield Push South

On By coilerxiiIn EssayLeave a comment

So WW3 1987 talked about a classic counterfactual: “What if Iraq attacked south in August 1991 against Desert Shield”? Actual Gulf War commanders have had differing opinions, and of course the context matters. I’ve done a bit of simming in Command Modern Operations, and have come to the conclusion that, well, it would have only been troublesome for the coalition by the standards of the actual war’s total squash. Why? Three main reasons.

  1. Air power is more powerful and immediately influential. Though I’m an air power skeptic, disrupting an offensive in the open is one of the easiest things for air power to do, especially one that’s trained for a much harder Fuldapocalypse.
  2. Geography and politics. That literally every country from Qatar down to Oman was part of the coalition means that the Iraqis literally can’t move far enough to stop the landing of reinforcements in friendly territory of some kind.
  3. Historical context. The Iraqis who didn’t think the takeover of Kuwait was a big deal historically had no contingency plans to move farther south. So they’d be winging it, and that’s not exactly a recipe for success given the other problems.

Gulf War Anniversary

On By coilerxiiIn Essay2 Comments

On the 30th anniversary of the 1991 Gulf War, I have these things to say.

  • The question of how successful the Iraqis could have been if they’d attacked into Saudi Arabia during the earlier part of Desert Shield is an open and disputed one. Even after the historical war, American commanders had different opinions.
  • While I believe it played a role in the decline of the technothriller, I don’t want to overstate it. According to the analysis of bestseller charts by Nader Elhefnawy, the technothriller was already on its way down significantly in 1990. My opinion is that it wasn’t the one-sided nature of the war so much as how it made high technology weapons look routine and normal.
  • Another part of this belief is that “big war thrillers” both continued to be published post-1991 (Cauldron, The Sixth Battle, etc…), and that they were always very rare to begin with.
  • Of course, I don’t think the Gulf War helped the technothriller either.
  • The very first time I used the word “Fuldapocalypse” was in a message board post on the Gulf War, where I mentioned the Americans were “revved up for a Fuldapocalypse“. It turned out to inspire the name of this blog.