Press Briefing 27 FEB 91

File: doc53_02.txt
Page: 02
Total Pages: 17

sort. of t)~ing in ojr ar~~d .rorc(:, a:; faz- ~~s f39h'ing t!001S, ~L ~`2!:e. r~~iiy
outnumbered two-to-one. In ~doitjofl to that, they had 4, .JOO tan~s versus Our 3( SOO
when the buildup was complete, and they had a grej:t deal more atillery than we do.

I think any student Ot military strategy would tell you that in order to attack
a position you should have a ratio of approxitnately three-to-one in favor of the
attacker. In order to attac~ a position that is heavily dug in and barricaded. such
as the one we had here, you should have a ratio of five-to-one in the way of troops
in favor of the attacker. So you can see basically what our problern was at that
time. We were outnumbered as a min~mum, three-to-two, as far as troops were
concerned; we were outnurtbered as far as tanYs were concerned, and we had to corne up
with some way to rrtake up the difference.

(Chart)

I apologize ~or the busy nature of this chart, but I think it's very important
for you to understand exactly what our strategy was. What you see here is a color
coding where green is a go sign or a good sign as far as our forces are concerned;
yellow would be a caution sign; and red would be a stop sign. ~reen represents units
that have been attritted below 50 percent strength; the yellow are units that are
between 50 and ~5 perc,ent strength; and of course the red are units that are over ~S
percent strength.

What we did, of course, was.start an extensive air campaign, and I briefed you
in cuite some detail on that in the past. One of the purposes, I told you at that
time, of that extensive air campaign was to isolate the Kuwaiti theater of operations
by taking out aXl the bridge-s and supply lines that ran between the north and the
southern part of Iraq. That was to prevent reinforcement and supply cdming into th£.'~
southern part of Iraq and the Kuwaiti theater of operations. We also conducted a
very heavy bombing campaign, and many people auestioned why the extensive bombing
campaign. This is the reason why. It was necessary to reduce these forces down to a
strength that made them weaker, particularly along the front line barri?r that we had
to go through.

We continued our heavy operations out in the sea because we wanted the 1ra~is
to continue to believe that we were going to conduct a massive amphibious operation
in this area. I think many of you recall the number of amphibious rehearsals we had,
to include Imminent Thunder, that was written about quite extensively for many
reasons. *~ut we continued to have those op~rations because we wan%ed him to
concentrate his forces -- which he did.

I think this is probably one of the most important parts of the entire briefing
I can talk about. As you know, very early on we took out the Iraqi Air rorce. We
knew that he had very, very limited reconnaissance means. Therefore1 when we took
o~t his air force, for all intents and purposes, we took out his ability to see ~hat
we were doing down here in Saudi Arabia. Once we had taken Out his eyes, we did what
could best be described as the Hail Mary play' in football. I think you recall when
the quarterback is desperate for a touchdown at t~~e very end, what h does is he sets
up behind the center, and all of a sudden, every single one of his recei'~ers goes way
out to one flank, and they all run down the field as fast as they possibly can and
into the end zon~, and he lobs the ball. In essence, that's what we did.

When we knew that hc couldn't sec us any more, we did a massiv movement of
troops all the way out to the west, to the extreme w~st, because at that time we kn~~
that he was stili fix~d in t)~is area with the vast majority of his forces, and once