The Pentagon Learned the Hard Way That Scud Missile Hunting Wasn’t Easy
The failure to destroy the launchers highlights how easy it can be to overestimate damage inflicted upon an enemy, and how difficult it is to hunt down an opponent intent on using hit-and-run tactics.
Here s What You Need to Know: Coalition air and Special Ops units claimed the destruction of over one hundred Scud launchers by the end of the war, and many operational histories repeat the claims of efficient Scud-destruction. But when Pentagon did its own postwar assessment, it came to a very different conclusion: it could not confirm the destruction of even
Remember the Scud.
Here s What You Need to Know: The failure to destroy the launchers highlights how easy it can be to overestimate damage inflicted upon an enemy, and how difficult it is to hunt down an opponent intent on using hit-and-run tactics. Today, North Korea maintains a far larger arsenal of mobile ballistic missile launchers than Iraq ever did weapons which could likely survive the opening days of a conflict.
While assembling the coalition that would eject Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1990–1991, one thing American military planners
weren’t worried about was Iraq’s Scud-B tactical ballistic missiles. True, Iraq had flung hundreds of the Soviet-designed missiles at Iranian cities during the Iran-Iraq war. But the weapons were derived from Nazi V-2 rockets dating back to World War II, and had difficulty hitting any target
U.S. forces might not be able to take out those missiles, after all.
Here s What You Need to Know: Opponents intent on using hit-and-run tactics are difficult to hunt down.
While assembling the coalition that would eject Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1990–1991, one thing American military planners
weren’t worried about was Iraq’s Scud-B tactical ballistic missiles. True, Iraq had flung hundreds of the Soviet-designed missiles at Iranian cities during the Iran-Iraq war. But the weapons were derived from Nazi V-2 rockets dating back to World War II, and had difficulty hitting any target
smaller than a city. The home-built Al-Hussein