Thursday, July 08, 2004

Gulf War II post-mortem

Fred Kaplan looks at how close we came to a military disaster. Saddam allowed us to assemble our forces in Kuwait without interference. The speed of the movement stretched supply lines almost to the breaking point but not quite. If it had taken two weeks longer it all would have ground to a halt as the needed spare parts gathered dust in a Kuwaiti warehouse. In the air there were some other lessons to be learned.

These two points are remarkable, in two ways. First, here we have a team of Army officers criticizing the attack helicopter—the Army's own weapon of air support—while gushing over the Air Force's weapon. Second, the A-10 scarcely exists anymore. The Air Force, which never wanted to build it in the first place, stopped production in the mid-1980s and would have melted them down to scrap metal had they not performed so well in the 1991 Gulf War.

The latest military budget, just passed by Congress, contains plenty of money for more attack helicopters—none for a resumption of the A-10 or something like it. Here's one place where the lessons learned from Gulf War II could be applied to great effect.

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