Going to War - GPS Declassified: From Smart Bombs to Smartphones - page 113

and clear extensive minefields. Saddam Hussein, believing that air power was
not decisive in wars and assuming that coalition troops would find maneuver-
ing in the desert as difficult as his own forces did, expected an amphibious
invasion. A large full-color relief map discovered after the war in a Kuwaiti
building the Iraqis converted to a military post confirmed that Hussein had
committed seventy thousand to eighty thousand troops and up to half of his
artillery to defend the Kuwaiti coast. 48 Iraq turned oceanfront high-rise con-
dominiums into gun perches, littered the beaches with earthen berms, trenches,
mines, barbed wire, and other obstacles, and placed more than 1,200 sea mines
in a 150-mile arc from the Iraqi-Kuwaiti border southward to the Saudi Ara-
bian border. 49 Navy and coalition ships conducted minesweeping operations
prior to the ground offensive as part of a “right feint” maneuver designed to
convince Hussein he was right and spent a year after the cease-ire destroying
mines and removing war wreckage to reopen commercial shipping lanes.
Space Facilitates Ground Offensive
The right feint's counterpart, the western “left hook” flank attack, which Gen.
H. Norman Schwarzkopf, commander in chief of the U.S. Central Command,
compared to a Hail Mary play in football, vividly illustrates the impact of gps
during Desert Storm. Soon after knocking out Iraq's electronic communica-
tions and grounding its air force planes or sending them fleeing to Iran, Schwar-
zkopf ordered more than two hundred thousand troops and tens of thousands
of vehicles massed on the Saudi-Kuwaiti border to move, undetected, more
than two hundred miles to the west. The westward shift positioned two full
U.S. Army Corps, the XVIII Airborne Corps and the VII Corps, pulled from
Cold War bases in Germany, to bypass and encircle the bulk of Iraq's dug-in
positions. This enormous march of men and materiel spanning three weeks
did not itself require gps navigation. The entire convoy rolled northwest on a
narrow but straight two-lane blacktop road adjacent to the Trans-Arabian Pipe-
line. Once the troops, armored equipment, and logistical supply units left the
roadway and prepared for desert battle, however, gps navigation, together with
satellite communications and imagery and night-vision devices, became indis-
pensable. Never before had armies waged battle on such a large scale, both day
and night in hostile desert conditions. 50 gps helped advancing units maintain
alignment with others on each flank, helped avoid fratricide through mistaken
engagement with friendly forces, aided combat search and rescue, and helped
ensure the delivery of food, fuel, and supplies where needed on a timely basis. 51