McPeak on Desert Storm

“My private conviction is that this is the first time in history that a field army has been defeated by airpower.” So stated Gen. Merrill A. McPeak, the Air Force Chief of Staff, in the most-quoted part of a famous briefing on Desert Storm.

The venue was a DOD news conference. Reporters wanted to know more about the air campaign, and McPeak laid it out in detail. Toward the end of a long session, and in response to a question, McPeak uttered the 21 words quoted above.

Though McPeak had taken pains to praise the other services and allies, press reaction was generally negative. The Washington Post, for example, reported McPeak had moved to “claim the lion’s share of credit for the rout of Iraqi forces in Kuwait.” It is clear from the context, however, that he had been more cautious than that.

I am delighted to be here today to tell an American success story. A great victory was achieved against a strong enemy and with little loss on our part. … It is largely a story about airpower, a success story for US and coalition air forces, but I need to remind myself and everybody that we were only part of a larger air, land, and sea campaign … in which all of the services made a very important contribution, and, of course, all of our allies as well.

I hope you’ll forgive me now, if I talk mostly about the air campaign for the rest of this time, since that’s my piece of the thing to talk about. You can bring me back from time to time and remind me that everybody else played an important part. …

The coalition air forces put up about 110,000 sorties. … The US Air Force flew nearly 60 percent of that total. We dropped about 88,500 tons of ordnance. Again, the US Air Force contribution was major. … In my judgment, it was the precision munitions that did the most important work. … The US Air Force did about 90 percent of that. …

After we had cut off the field-deployed Iraqi Army, we went to work on major categories of equipment. … I believe strongly that we were very conservative in our claims [about the destruction of Iraqi tanks and other weapons]. Once we actually did push in on the ground, it was obvious that we had achieved destruction rates well above something like 50 percent we may have been claiming in all classes of major equipment. … I think we achieved very large levels of destruction prior to G-Day, and I’m convinced that made the job a lot easier for our ground forces. …

The US Air Force can go anywhere in the world very quickly, and it has tremendous destructive effect when ordered to do that by the President. It is important that we had one concept of operations … for the air, land, and sea campaign. It was very important they all marched to the same set of orders. Air superiority once again proved its importance. Our flexibility to improvise, make up tactics, and so forth, was very important. Stealth, in combination with precision guided munitions, I think, has certainly the potential to revolutionize warfare. Probably the most important lesson [is] we have quality people that are well-trained, that are very confident, and they proved it. …

I want to say a word or two about the Iraqi Air Force. I think they did rather well, under the circumstances. … They happened to be the second best air force in the fracas. Having the second best air force is like having the second best poker hand—it’s often the best strategy to fold early. … The lesson for us is we do not want to enter combat with the second best air force. …

[US Navy aviation] made a tremendous contribution. It was not redundant. They were tremendously effective in everything they did. … The RAF did a first-class job on everything they tried to do. It was an honor to be involved with them in this effort. …

I projected, in the deliberations leading up to the decision, that we might lose as many as four or five aircraft a day. My private hunch … was less than that, but, you know, airpower advocates over the years have gotten themselves in trouble bragging too much about what we’re going to do, so I tried to nudge that and add a little fudge factor in there, but I certainly, even in my most optimistic, wildest dreams, would not have said we would lose one aircraft every three days. …

I can’t offer any explanation for that. We do have the world’s only operational stealth airplane, and since it wasn’t scratched, it tended to skew the results in our favor. But all of the services did extraordinarily well—the Marines, the Navy, the allied air forces. This was first-class operation.

Having said that, am I proud of the performance turned in by the United States Air Force? You bet. …

My private conviction is that this is the first time in history that a field army has been defeated by airpower. It’s a remarkable performance by the coalition air forces, but there are some things airpower can do and does very well, and some things it can’t do, and we should never expect it to do very well—that is, move in on the terrain and dictate terms to the enemy. Our ground forces did that. I think, by the way, again, they did a remarkable job. … I think they did a magnificent job.