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American Military During The War Era

Better Essays

William Heck
Dr Milam

Americans in the Desert

1991 was one of the most prominent moments in American military times of the post-Cold War era, though it was only a six week siege, it is comparable to the wars in Afghanistan, Korea, and Vietnam. It 's shortness in duration does not take away from the incredible magnitiude of absolute destruction and size of the war itself. This is the Gulf War, and America was going to dominate. To this day people wonder if the Bush Administration at the time had just cause to go to war with Iraq, who was under Saddam Hussein at the time. Through this paper I will be justifying that America was probably not in the right in starting this war, only going in for it 's best interest. Many different …show more content…

To give you perspective, World War II lasted three hundred and 10 weeks and that war was known for aereal bomb droppings. In just two weeks of being in combat with Iraq, Coalition forces dropped more explosives in two weeks than all of World War 2. We were giving Saddam and his troops a complete display of shock and awe. At the peak of troop numbers we had 430,000 and every day American forces were moving 6 million pounds of supplies daily. The bottom of the line is that the Coalition, mainly America, was going to win this war via superior technology and man power. Before this war, the Republican Guard was seen as the greatest military force in the Middle East and no one was going to beat them. We see in the six week campaign that this was not to be the case, as casualty reports for the Iraq side to be 20,000 all the way up to almost 35,000. Whereas US forces had 148 KIA throughout the entirty of the seven month event including both operations.

America might have no lost many soldiers, but the amount of finances used during this war was staggering. The US forces were paying $17.9 billion dollars for the war where as the rest of the coalition forces of 35 other countries were a combined $43.1 billion. This does not include the massive amount of subsidies that Saudi Arabia had given the allies, amounting to $43 billion by the time it is all said and done. Kuwait, who had already been riddled by the burning of 640 of their oil wells paid $22 billion

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