This defensive posture also established valuable time for the UN and US militaries to build up more forces to mount a major offensive to forcefully remove Saddam's forces if he did not withdraw his forces from Kuwait. Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein ordered his Army to invade and occupy their neighbor border country of Kuwait in early August 1990 with approximately 300,000 troops, because he accused Kuwait of "siphoning crude oil from common border oil fields and accused them of keeping oil prices low to assist Western oil-buying nations" in addition claimed "Kuwait was an artificial state carved out of Iraqi coast by Western colonies." 6 General Norman Schwarzkopf was Commander-in-Chief of United States Central Command (CENTCOM) and led the United Nations and US first phase response to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait by establishing a deterrent defensive force to prevent the Iraqi Army from continuing into Saudi Arabia. Operation Desert Shield/Desert Shield were the largest combat operations in US military history since the Vietnam War. 4 This operation created an unobstructed pathway for a plethora of fast moving Navy and Air Force bombers to fly deep into Iraq and destroy key targets to start Operation Desert Storm. 3 The task force operation was named Normandy after the site of the 101st Airborne Division's famous airborne insertion on D-Day during World War II. "One of the smallest yet most successful and important Joint-Army-Air Force operations in the initial strikes in Operation Desert Storm was Task Force Normandy." 2 During the opening hours in the Iraqi desert on 17 January 1991, Task Force Normandy consisted of eight Army AH-64 Apache helicopters working with four Air Force MH-53J Pave Low helicopters were on a mission to destroy two Iraqi early warning (EW) radar sites with the purpose to blind Iraqi air defense and open a twenty-mile wide air corridor in the opening minutes of the air campaign. Operations in the deep area involve efforts to prevent uncommitted or out of contact enemy maneuver forces from being committed in a coherent manner or preventing enemy enabling capabilities, such as fires and air defense, from creating effects in the close area. This is a reprint of Chapter 8 from Deep Maneuver: Historical Case Studies of Maneuver in Large-Scale Combat Operations, part of The Large-Scale Combat Operations Series.
Task Force Normandy: The Deep Operation that Started Operation Desert Storm Col.
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