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Subject: CENTCOM NEWS BRIEF

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C~NTCO.~ News ~riefing
General ri. Norman Schwar~kopf, USA
Riyadh, Saud~ Arabia
~ednesday,  February 2~, 1991   1:00 p.m. (~ST)

General schwarzkopf:   Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.  Than~ you for being

tiere.

      I prOmised some of you a few days ago that as soon as the opportunity presented
itself I would give you a coinpiete rundown on what we were doing,  and more impor-
tantly, wfly we were doing it -- the strategy behind what we were doing.   I've been
a~ked by Secretafl: Cheney to ~o that this evening, so if you will bear with me, we're
going to go tbrough a briefing.   I apologize to the folks over here who won't be able
to see the charts, but we're going to go through a complete briefing 0£ the opera-
tion.

(Chart)

          This goes bacic to ~ August through 17 January. As you recall, we started our
   deployment on Lhe ~th of August.   Basically what we started out against was a couple
)  of hundred thousand Iraqis that were in the Kuwait theater ~r operations.    I oon't
   have to remind you all t~at we brought over, initially, defen~ive forces in the forr~
   of the 101st, the 82nd, the 24~h Xechanized Infantry aivision, the 3rd Armored
   Cavalry, and in essence, we had thern arrayed to the south, behInd the Saudi task
   ~orce.  Also there were Arab forces over here in th~s area,  array~d in defensive
   positions.   That, in essence, is the way we startcd.

(Chart)

      In the middle of November, the decisIon was made to increase the force bccause,
by that time, huge nu~bers of Iraqi forces had flowed into the area, and generally in
the disposition as they're shown right here.   Therefore, we increased ~he forces and
built up more forces~

      I would tell you that at this time we made a very deliberate decision to ali~n
all of those forces within the boundary looking north towards Kuwait -- this beinq
King Khali~ ~ilitary City over here.   So we aligned those forces so it very much
looked like they were all aligned d~rectly on the Iraqi position

      we also,  at that time, had a very active naval presence out in the Gulf, and we
made sure that everybody understood ~bout that naval presence.   One ot the reasons
why we did that is it becarne very apparent to us early on that the Iraqi  were quite
concerned about an atnphibious operation across the shores to liberate Kuwait -- this
being Kuwait City.   They put a very, very heavy barrier of infantry along here, and
they proceeded to build an extensive barrier that went all the way across the border,
down and around and up the side of Kuwait

      Basically,  the p~oblern we were faced with wa~ thi~: When you lookcd at the
troop numbers, they really outnumbered us about three-to-two,  ard when you consider
th@ number of combat service support people we have -- that's ~ogisticians ard that

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