564 { China’s Quest
long, high-casualty, and costly war, very much like the US experience in
Vietnam, and that prospects of a US defeat in such a war were high.^14 Iraq’s
armed forces were large (over one million men, making it the fifth largest in
the world in 1990), well armed, well trained, and veteran, having only recently
concluded an eight-year-long war with Iran. Iraq’s army was well outfitted
with Soviet, Chinese, and French weaponry. A good portion of Iraq’s tanks
were, in fact, Chinese exports. (China had sold arms to both sides during the
1980–1988 Iran-Iraq war.) Iraqi forces were well dug in and prepared to con-
front American attackers with heavy artillery, armored strikes, and line after
line of trench defenses. Cities would be defended house by house. US casual-
ties were certain to be high, Chinese analysts predicted. US forces would be-
come bogged down in a protracted war of attrition. As causalities mounted,
so too would opposition to the war in the United States. Chinese analysts fell
prey to a common malady: fighting the last war. They assumed the US expe-
rience in Iraq would approximate the Vietnam War.
The conflict did not go as Chinese analysts had predicted. US forces
began with thirty-eight days of intense air bombardment. Cyber attacks on
Iraqi computers and information systems disabled Iraqi command, control,
and communications, often in the first hours of the war. Carefully targeted
attacks knocked out Iraqi telecommunications and electrical power systems.
Stealth bombers conducted precision strikes of great accuracy and effective-
ness while remaining invulnerable to Iraqi air defenses. Electronic warfare
aircraft jammed the anti-aircraft facilities that still managed to operate. Once
Iraqi air defense systems had collapsed, Iraqi ground forces were subjected
to heavy, sustained, and murderous bombing by US heavy bombers. US air-
craft carriers and cruise-missile ships stood a safe distance off shore, well
beyond the range of Iraqi coastal defenses, and launched wave after wave of
bombing and cruise missile attacks. Most aerial bombs were guided by laser
or global positioning systems, and, unlike in previous wars, were highly accu-
rate. When Saddam Hussein played his trump card of ballistic missile attacks
against Israel and Saudi Arabia, US anti-missile systems proved somewhat
effective against them (although not as effective as reported at the time). In
space, seventy US satellites were allocated to the Iraq war, providing real-
time information to US warplanes and ships, and operational commanders.
An entire huge battle space, from space to far out at sea, to tactical aircraft
and other “shooters,” were integrated and woven together via computer net-
works. When US ground operations began on February 23, they lasted only
100 hours. In that period, US armored forces outflanked and enveloped Iraqi
forces, slicing quickly through the best-prepared Iraqi defenses. When the
fighting ended with Iraq pleading for a ceasefire, Kuwait had been liberated.
US causalities were light: only 113 US personnel were killed in the war. A co-
hort of Chinese military officers, numbering somewhere between 20 and 300,
observed the fighting from the Iraqi side.^15