Some guy named Saddam Hussein decided he needed the oil and ports that were part of Kuwait, and sent 100,000 troops over the border, taking over the country in less than 48 hours. Most of the Kuwaiti military and government leadership retreated to Saudi Arabia, which at the time it was feared that if Hussein were so inclined to have immediately invaded that nation, he could have done so relatively easily.<\/p>\n
While some of the ancillary causes of the invasion may be disputed, what is certain is that the Iran-Iraq war had depleted Iraq’s finances to the tune of some $80 billion, and that Hussein had looked to previously friendly Kuwait (they had provided port space after Basra was closed) to pay at least part of that debt, or at least forgive it. Negotiations in 1988-89 had soured relations between the two countries.<\/p>\n
By 8 August, ground troops including the 2nd Brigade of the 82nd Airborne, 1st Battalion, 3rd Marines, and air assets including F-15’s and two CVBG’s were in or on their way to Saudi Arabia. They would be joined by over 500,000 coalition troops by January 1991.<\/p>\n
As for me, I wasn’t there–I was floating (sunk) somewhere off the coast of a Pacific Rim nation on op when we got word of the invasion a few days after the event. News on a submarine is a sketchy thing, where headlines and stories are given in a summary of a couple of lines, and that’s only if time is available to receive that after essential message traffic is sent and received. By the time we got back to Yokosuka, Japan just over a month after the invasion occured, the only question we were asking was whether we’d be going or not. We soon found out that there were no plans to have a major submarine presence in the Gulf, although several submarines were ultimately in the region for Desert Storm, including USS Chicago (SSN-721), USS Louisville (SSN-724), and USS Pittsburgh (SSN-720)–all VLS (Vertical Launch System) boats which allowed the latter two boats to launch at least 12 Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles (TLAMs) whereas my old boat had “conventional” launches out the torpedo tubes.<\/p>\n
The history is well known to those here, many of whom were either serving or in the “sandbox” during DS\/DS. <\/p>\n
Discuss.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"