No one pretends these systems are flawless. ![]() Perry Smith notes that a “battlefield coordination detachment” has been added to the Combined Air Operations Center that would call the shots in any new Iraq air war. InsertArt(1746979)One clear advantage today, according to Bill Martel, a professor at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I., is that American forces now have Global Positioning Satellite devices - GPS for short - which should make their locations more “knowable” to their comrades. And miscalculations about the effects of vaccines, the vindictiveness of Iraq’s occupying forces and the Iraqi Republican Guard’s determination to survive also had serious consequences: Gulf War Syndrome, the world’s largest ever oil spill and a failure to defang Saddam’s army when the chance arose. Tragic errors in target selection and bombs that simply missed their intended targets caused civilian deaths that briefly threatened the coalition. Disputes over the effectiveness of attacks on Iraqi divisions bedeviled air war commanders. ![]() Two huge Navy warships were nearly sunk by Iraqi mines, exposing the fleet’s inadequate mine countermeasures. Entire airwings became dependent on amphetamines, the “go pills” doled out to keep pilots alert on long missions. Friendly fire claimed 24 percent of all Americans killed in action, and more British troops fell to U.S. military a serious round of soul-searching about mistakes that had cost lives - its own and those of Iraqi non-combatants. But the Gulf War spawned in each branch of the U.S. These are questions for politicians and academics, not soldiers. troops still be in Saudi Arabia today - the main issue animating al-Qaida - if Washington had supported the anti-Saddam uprisings by Iraqi Kurds and Shiites that followed the war? ![]() Should the United States have pressed on to Baghdad in 1991?
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