Tom Allen, produced findings that, in sum, yield remarkable evidence of airpower’s effectiveness against attacking ground forces.Īt Khafji, Joint airpower demonstrated something new: a heretofore unknown ability to stop moving enemy armored forces at night, on short notice, and without a synchronized ground counterattack. In 1995, the Air Force Studies and Analyses Agency at the Pentagon began a major reconstruction of the battle. Studies of the airpower response to the Khafji offensive began at Air University, located at Maxwell AFB, Ala., shortly after the war. Fogleman–all have recognized Khafji’s significance as a marker of airpower’s increasing ability to meld sensors and advanced weapons under central control to gain the advantage over enemy forces on the ground. However, three former USAF Chiefs of Staff–Gens.

Intense interest in the Desert Storm air war, and the ground offensive, overshadowed Khafji at the time and in most histories of Operation Desert Storm. The Iraqi offensive at Khafji began on that January night, almost four weeks prior to the start of the main ground war in late February.

The main phase of the Battle of Khafji lasted less than 48 hours, but it marked a turning point in the debate over the ability of airpower to dominate enemy maneuver forces.

There were thousands of little muddy footprints running to the east, hiding in ditches, pipelines and whatever.What the Joint STARS crew saw that night was, in fact, the beginning of Iraq’s only organized offensive during the Persian Gulf War. “We elected to destroy the force” that was in the near vicinity, he said, and one infantry brigade, three tank task forces, five artillery battalions and an Apache helicopter battalion “conducted a classic attack.” Actual fighting took only 15 to 30 minutes, he said. In the pre-dawn darkness of March 2, McCaffrey said, his forces came under fire from rocket-propelled grenades-a weapon fired by an infantryman’s rifle-and a Soviet-made T-72 tank as the Iraqis retreated from Basra on the road to Baghdad. Some of them didn’t fire and surrendered and some of them did (fire).” In his testimony on the battle, McCaffrey said: “I don’t know for sure what happened, but throughout the day we had enemy forces bumping into us. “Say hello to Allah,” one American was recorded as saying moments before a Hellfire obliterated one of 102 vehicles blasted by the Apaches, Newsday said. Sloyan, the video showed scores of elite Iraqi soldiers apparently wounded or killed as Apache helicopters raked the Republican Guard Hammurabi Division with laser-guided Hellfire missiles.

The gulf wars greatest tank battle