F-117 Critical Communications Target 1st Night Operation Desert Storm
USAF
Thirty-five years after Operation Desert Storm, the conflict remains the last major regional war fought—and decisively won—by the United States. That fact alone should give pause to anyone concerned with America’s ability to prevail in future conflicts against capable state adversaries. Yet the true significance of Desert Storm is not found in recounting the events of 1991 or celebrating a past victory. Its enduring value lies in understanding why it succeeded so decisively—and why the United States subsequently moved away from the very principles that made that success possible. It is time for a reset, for what is at stake in the current security environment demands America and its allies succeed.
Desert Storm was not simply a triumph of technology, nor was it a product of happenstance or overwhelming numerical superiority. It was a carefully conceived and executed campaign that exploited the inherent advantages of aerospace power through an effects-based, systems approach to warfare. It demonstrated how strategic objectives could be achieved rapidly, decisively, and with minimal loss of life by focusing on outcomes rather than attrition, and by attacking an adversary as an integrated system rather than as a collection of targets. It centered on affecting the centers of gravity that allowed Saddam Hussein to wage war.
Unfortunately, in the decades following Desert Storm—particularly after 9/11—the United States largely abandoned this way of war. Instead, it embraced a fundamentally different conflict model centered on prolonged, ground-centric campaigns of occupation, counterinsurgency, and nation-building. Leaders focused on restraining power more than adopting strategies that were focused on winning. Not only did those approaches devolve into endless whack-a-mole operations, but they failed to achieve our strategic objectives in either Iraq or Afghanistan. These campaigns were also poorly suited to the major regional—and potentially global—conflicts that lie ahead.
Reflecting on the 35th anniversary of Desert Storm should therefore not be merely commemorative, but rather as a call to relearn how America actually won a war. Our adversaries have studied Desert Storm carefully. China internalized the lessons of the conflict and built a military designed to counter the strengths it revealed. The United States military, by contrast, risks forgetting them altogether.
A War Defined by Strategic Discipline
One of the most under-appreciated aspects of Desert Storm was the clarity and restraint exercised at the strategic level. As General Chuck Horner—the joint force air component commander during the conflict—observed, the U.S. military was given a finite mission by national leadership: restore the status quo ante by expelling Iraqi forces from Kuwait. There was no mandate to remake Iraq politically, transform its society, or pursue open-ended objectives untethered from military means. This campaign was led by leaders who had come of age during the Vietnam War. They saw their fellow service members fight and die in futility. They were bound and determined to avoid making similar mistakes. They knew success demanded a laser-like focus on core strategic objectives that could be realistically attained through military power and unified diplomatic efforts.
That clarity mattered. It allowed military planners to align ends, ways, and means in a coherent fashion. It also avoided the sort of political interference and mission creep that plagued the Vietnam War and later undermined operations in Afghanistan, where critical U.S. strategic objectives were rapidly achieved, only to be followed by decades of effort aimed at trying to reshape a deeply tribal society into a modern democracy—an unobtainable and definitely non-military task.
This strategic discipline is what made the successful outcome of Desert Storm achievable. It also enabled planners to focus on how best to achieve the desired outcome, rather than on sustaining an indefinite presence or managing political transformation. The result was a campaign designed from the outset to achieve decisive effects, not incremental progress.
Airpower as the Central Instrument of Strategy
For the first time in history, Desert Storm used airpower not merely as a supporting arm, but as the primary instrument of strategy. Air forces operated from the opening moments of the war through its conclusion, attacking across the entire geographic breadth and depth of Iraq simultaneously. The effect was seismic. Ground forces, meanwhile, were employed as a blocking force for most of the conflict, preventing Iraqi incursions into Saudi Arabia while airpower systematically dismantled the Iraqi military apparatus and the regime that controlled it.
This was a radical departure from traditional approaches to warfare. Rather than beginning with ground maneuver and using airpower to support it, Gen Schwarzkopf, the U.S. military commander, reversed the logic. The air campaign was designed to attack Iraq as a system—targeting leadership, command and control, critical infrastructure, and fielded forces simultaneously. The goal was not merely to destroy things, but to negate Iraq’s ability to function as a coherent military entity.
The effects of this effort were unprecedented. In the first 24 hours of the Desert Storm air campaign, coalition forces attacked more discrete targets than the Eighth Air Force struck in Europe over two years during World War II. Never before had so many targets been attacked in so little time. The effect was paralysis, confusion, and the rapid collapse of Saddam Hussein’s ability to wage war.
Compare that to the follow-on conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Yemen, where the focus was on gradualism and restraint, not striking a knockout blow as rapidly as possible. Victory must always be the guiding light, not a counterproductive focus with projecting only enough power not to lose. Adversaries sense this restraint and harness it to gain the upper strategic hand over time.
Effects-Based Warfare and the Systems Approach
At the heart of Desert Storm’s success was an effects-based, systems approach to planning and execution. Rather than focusing on attrition or sequential destruction, we asked more fundamental questions: What effects must be achieved to accomplish the operational level and corresponding strategic objectives? Those questions drove a campaign designed to paralyze, disrupt, dislocate, and ultimately collapse the enemy system as a whole.
Three developments made this possible. First was the maturation of precision-guided munitions, which allowed small numbers of aircraft to achieve effects previously requiring massed formations and enormous volumes of ordnance. Second was the advent of stealth technology, which enabled aircraft to penetrate heavily defended airspace without requiring large numbers of accompanying aircraft to protect the bomb-droppers. Third was a planning philosophy enabled by these technological advances that valued outputs over inputs—effects over effort.
The results were striking. In the first 24 hours of the war, 36 F-117 stealth fighters attacked more targets than the entire non-stealth air and missile force of the six aircraft carrier battle groups in theater. Over the course of the conflict, the F-117—flying just two percent of combat sorties—struck over 40 percent of Iraq’s fixed strategic targets. Precision, stealth, and an effects-based planning approach did not simply improve efficiency; they fundamentally altered what was operationally possible.
Technology finally caught up with airpower theory in Desert Storm.
Strategic attacks on leadership, command and control, electricity, transportation, and communications had a debilitating effect on Iraqi forces in the field. Foundational to this approach was the recognition that negating an adversary’s ability to operate can be as important—if not more so—than destroying its forces outright…but we did that too.
Crushing Fielded Forces from the Air
Contrary to some retrospective claims, Desert Storm was not an example of AirLand Battle in action. AirLand Battle was an Army doctrine designed for a different war, focused on combined air and ground operations in a linear fight against Soviet forces in Europe. Desert Storm followed a fundamentally different logic.
Coalition airpower attacked Iraqi fielded forces directly and decisively, well before the introduction of friendly ground forces. The Iraqi Republican Guard—one of Saddam Hussein’s key centers of gravity—was systematically isolated and degraded from the air. Kill boxes, subdivided into smaller sectors, allowed aircraft under the control of airborne “killer scouts” to locate and destroy Iraqi armor and artillery with remarkable efficiency.
“Tank plinking” by F-111Fs armed with laser-guided bombs alone accounted for more than 1,500 armor kills. By the time coalition ground forces advanced, airpower had destroyed or disabled more than 4,200 Iraqi tanks, armored vehicles, and artillery pieces. Iraqi units were so demoralized and disorganized that, in one now-famous incident, a group of soldiers surrendered to an unmanned Pioneer drone.
As the Gulf War Air Power Survey later concluded, airpower essentially paralyzed the Iraqi heavy divisions on which Saddam’s strategy depended. Those units retained little ability to maneuver, reinforce, or conduct coordinated operations. The ground operations that followed were not a hard-fought contest—they were the physical confirmation of a defeat already delivered.
It is worth noting that other nations understand the value of this strategic approach to warfare. Most notably is Israel’s 2025 air campaign against Iran. It was an overwhelmingly successful campaign that focused on achieving strategic effects.
Jointness, Properly Understood
Desert Storm was also the first major test of the joint force constructs established by the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986. It succeeded not because of vague notions of interservice cooperation, but because of unity of command and disciplined adherence to the principle of using the right force at the right place at the right time.
Gen Schwarzkopf’s decision to consolidate all coalition airpower under a single combined/joint force air component commander was essential. As was his strategic decision to capitalize on using airpower to cripple Iraq’s military prior to exposing coalition ground forces to battle. This remains the quintessential example of “jointness” in action and was most likely responsible for avoiding the tens of thousands of U.S. Army casualties forecast by war games prior to the conflict. These decisions enabled the development and execution of a coherent air campaign—as free as possible from parochial service agendas. This was jointness as it was meant to function—not homogeneity, not equal participation for its own sake, but integration under competent air domain leadership.
Claims that Desert Storm succeeded because “interservice cooperation trumped ideology” miss the point. The campaign succeeded because service parochialism was subordinated to campaign objectives by a functional air component commander, and when parochial acts did occur, the panoply of available air forces that we possessed allowed Gen Horner to ignore those actions to avoid inter-service fights. His logic was that energy was better focused on crushing Saddam’s enterprise. That distinction matters greatly as the United States considers how to organize and command forces in future high-end conflicts. Today, U.S. air combat forces are less than half the size of what they were during Desert Storm. While parochial actions could be tolerated in 1991, today, they could be disastrous and cannot be tolerated.
The Post-9/11 Departure from Proven Principles
Despite the effectiveness of Desert Storm’s lessons, the United States spent the next several decades moving away from them. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. sought a peace dividend, and there began the decline of the U.S. military. After 9/11, American warfighting doctrine became dominated by counterinsurgency—a ground-centric, Army-driven model focused on population security, nation-building, and prolonged presence.
Airpower, rather than being employed strategically, was increasingly misused. Airpower became a supporting arm for counterinsurgency operations rather than a primary instrument for achieving strategic and operational level effects. In some cases, air component commanders found themselves intentionally cut out from critical operational planning and as a result employment plans were disconnected from optimal airpower use. This happened in planning Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan, in executing operations against the Islamic State in Syria during Operation Inherent Resolve as well as more recently in Yemen during Operation Rough Rider.
The shift to occupation, attrition-centric approaches had profound consequences. Not only did counterinsurgency fail to deliver lasting success in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it also diverted attention, resources, and intellectual energy away from preparing for high-end conflict. Modernization of the Air Force was curtailed. The F-22 program was canceled at less than half its stated military requirement. Other aircraft programs were terminated, stretched out, and neglected. Air Force combat forces have shrunk to 40 percent the size they were during Desert Storm. Necessary Air Force recapitalization was deferred to pay the Army’s bills, with the Army allocated over $1.3 trillion more than the Air Force during the 20 years after 9/11—$65 billon/year on average more than the Air Force. As a result, the Air Force now flies 10 major aircraft types that first flew over 50 years ago. Those aircraft constitute over two-thirds of today’s Air Force inventory. As just one example, the youngest B-52 is over 63 years old. The U.S. Air Force has become a truly geriatric force.
Yet, while today’s Air Force is smaller and older than at any time since its founding, it is in more in demand by combatant commands than ever before. Significant bills lie ahead if we are to recover the Air Force the nation needs to succeed in future fights.
China Learned What We Forgot
While the United States drifted, others studied. China, in particular, carefully analyzed the Desert Storm air campaign and built a military designed to counter the advantages it revealed. Chinese doctrine emphasizes precision strike, information dominance, aerospace power, and systemic disruption—precisely the elements that defined Desert Storm’s success.
The challenge the United States now faces in the Indo-Pacific is the result of the U.S. military ignoring lessons that China internalized. Desert Storm showed how to defeat a large, modern military without fighting it symmetrically. China has been working hard to learn how to counter that approach—it established its paradigm of anti-access/area-denial as a result. Meanwhile, the United States military risked forgetting how to execute it while distracted by un-winnable wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and firing leaders for advocating preparing for war with China—Air Force Chief of Staff, General T. Michael Moseley and Air Force Secretary Mike Wynne.
Relearning How America Wins
The 35th anniversary of Desert Storm should serve as a wake-up call. Future major regional conflicts will not resemble the counterinsurgency campaigns that consumed most of today’s U.S. military officers’ careers. They will be fast, intense, multi-domain contests against capable adversaries who can contest air, space, sea, land, cyberspace, and the electromagnetic spectrum from the outset.
In such wars, success will once again hinge on the intelligent application of military power through an effects-based, systems approach. It will require leaders who understand how to exploit the unique advantages of each domain, planners who focus on outcomes rather than activity, and institutions willing to internalize lessons from both success and failure.
Desert Storm remains the clearest modern example of how to do this right. Its lessons are not obsolete—they are urgent. We ignore them at our peril.
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davedeptula/2026/01/16/desert-storm-at-35-time-to-relearn-how-america-can-win-wars/
