Though I cannot answer for the Coalition leadership, the Iraqis in February did in fact alter their strategy: they sought to end the war, offering to withdraw from Kuwait and renounce their claims to sovereignty there. (Their offer, of course, proved to be too little and too late.)

Meanwhile, the campaign to prevent the resupply of logistics to the battlefield proved to be very effective. The Iraqi Army had serious problems providing units in the field with sufficient food and water. On the other hand, efforts to deny resupply of ammunition had little or no impact, as the defeated army surrendered before expending large amounts of ammunition. The joke was, “Come to Kuwait if you want to buy an AK-47. They are like new, shot once, and dropped once.” In this war, we stopped ammunition from reaching the soldiers, but they had all they needed. After enduring six weeks of aerial bombardment, their strongest motive was surrender, not dying for Saddam.

In other words, perhaps our information-warfare attacks proved far more effective than Coalition leaders realized. And perhaps the Iraqi Army failed to maneuver in the face of our ground onslaught because our campaign to deny them intelligence had a far greater impact than we comprehended at the time. Certainly, despite our apparent success with the more traditional means to isolate the battlefield, we need to study this new form of warfare in far more detail to determine which works best—the classical or the new method of interdiction . . . or both together.

Isolating the battlefield, as General Schwarzkopf conceived it, had one other—perhaps surprising—goal. Not only did he intend to prevent food, ammunition, water, communications, or reinforcements from reaching the enemy; he also intended to prevent the Iraqi Army occupying Kuwait from getting out. Or, in the words of Colin Powell, “We are going to cut off the head of the snake, and then we are going to kill it.”

On the whole, airpower succeeded in that aim . . . at least in the open country, where roads and bridges were exposed. Airpower so successfully dropped the bridges across the rivers of southern Iraq that, years after the war, it was difficult to travel by car to the countryside. Where airpower did not succeed was in preventing the Iraqis from hiding many of their tanks and armored personnel carriers in the cities of southern Iraq. The only way to hit these from the air would have exposed the populations of the cities to widespread aerial attacks, and the Americans and their Coalition partners were not willing to do that. Attacking the cities from the ground was, of course, another option, but few Coalition leaders were eager to take that step when their stated goal was to eject the Iraqis from Kuwait.

KILLING TANKS AND ARTILLERY