- 5 hours ago
The Gulf War was over fast, but the story behind it was anything but simple. Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait set off a chain reaction that pulled in the United States, a multinational coalition, and a massive air and ground campaign that reshaped modern Middle East history.
This military history documentary breaks down Operation Desert Shield, Operation Desert Storm, the air war over Baghdad, the 100-hour ground offensive, and the aftermath that followed. It also explores the cost of the conflict, from coalition casualties and Iraqi losses to the uprisings, no-fly zones, and the unfinished business that helped lead to the Iraq War years later.
Told in a fast-paced, explanatory style, this is history and war analysis for viewers who want a clear, engaging breakdown of the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein, Kuwait, the Republican Guard, and the Pentagon’s biggest gamble. If you’re searching for Gulf War explained, military history documentary, Operation Desert Storm, Iraq invasion of Kuwait, or modern warfare analysis, this deep dive covers the key events and consequences in one place.
This military history documentary breaks down Operation Desert Shield, Operation Desert Storm, the air war over Baghdad, the 100-hour ground offensive, and the aftermath that followed. It also explores the cost of the conflict, from coalition casualties and Iraqi losses to the uprisings, no-fly zones, and the unfinished business that helped lead to the Iraq War years later.
Told in a fast-paced, explanatory style, this is history and war analysis for viewers who want a clear, engaging breakdown of the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein, Kuwait, the Republican Guard, and the Pentagon’s biggest gamble. If you’re searching for Gulf War explained, military history documentary, Operation Desert Storm, Iraq invasion of Kuwait, or modern warfare analysis, this deep dive covers the key events and consequences in one place.
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00:00The Gulf War killed somewhere between 20,000 and 50,000 Iraqis and 292 coalition troops.
00:08In 42 days, America flew 100,000 combat missions and moved half a million people to the other side of
00:15the planet to do it.
00:16We didn't lose a single major engagement and beat the fourth largest army in the world in 100 hours.
00:23Yet somehow, we ended up back here 12 years later fighting the same guy.
00:29This is the Gulf War Explained.
00:32A war so unpredictable, the Pentagon prepared for tens of thousands of American deaths.
00:37But only 150 ended up dying.
00:40So how did the U.S. win one of the most one-sided wars in history and still walk away
00:46with unfinished business?
00:48Well, to know that, we gotta start with a guy who was completely broke.
00:52Because in August of 1988, Saddam Hussein walked out of eight years of war with Iran and declared himself the
01:00winner.
01:01But he'd actually won nothing.
01:03No land, no money, and about a million casualties on both sides.
01:08And he also owed the world somewhere around $60 billion.
01:13Roughly $14 billion of that went to one tiny country sitting right below him, Kuwait.
01:19So, Saddam asked Kuwait to forgive it.
01:22Because the way he saw it, he'd spent eight years being the wall between them and Iran.
01:27And the least they could do is throw out the debt.
01:30But Kuwait said pay up.
01:33Oh, man.
01:34Oh, this is gonna be bad, isn't it?
01:35But it got even worse.
01:38Because Kuwait kept pumping oil past its OPEC limit, which drove the price down.
01:44Saddam did a little math and found out every $1 a barrel dropped cost Iraq about a billion dollars a
01:50year.
01:51Then he accused Kuwait of drilling sideways under the border into the Romalia oil field and stealing Iraqi crude.
01:59Oil workers tried to explain to Saddam that's just how oil drilling works.
02:03But Saddam had already decided.
02:05This was war.
02:07So, on July 25th, 1990, he called up the American ambassador, April Glaspie, to see how mad Washington would be
02:15if he actually started a war.
02:17And she told him America had no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.
02:2535 years later, people are still arguing about whether that statement gave Saddam the green light to start a war.
02:32Because at 2 in the morning on August 2nd, 1990, nearly 90,000 Iraqi troops rolled across the Kuwaiti border,
02:40led by Saddam's Republican Guard.
02:42And Kuwait only had about 16,000 troops.
02:46Most of them were asleep.
02:47The Kuwaiti troops fought long enough to get the Emir out the back of Dasman Palace and into a helicopter,
02:53while his own half-brother, Sheikh Fahad, died on the steps protecting the palace.
02:58But by lunchtime, it was over.
03:01Iraq erased Kuwait off the map and called it the 19th province of Iraq.
03:06They put up new street signs and everything.
03:08But Saddam wasn't done yet.
03:11Their neighbor Saudi Arabia had about a quarter of the world's oil and an army nowhere near big enough to
03:17stop Iraq.
03:18So the only country big enough to do something about it was the United States.
03:23But in 1990, a whole lot of Americans didn't believe their country was up for it.
03:29Because it had been 15 years since the last helicopter left Saigon and the U.S. officially lost the war
03:35in Vietnam.
03:36And the nation was still feeling the effects of it.
03:39The army could barely recruit anyone.
03:41And trust in the government was tanking.
03:44And the two men about to run this war had to convince America that they could actually win again.
03:49Cuz Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf both did two tours in Vietnam.
03:55Schwarzkopf personally took four bullets in one afternoon.
03:58And even landed a helicopter in a live minefield.
04:02These guys were heroes.
04:03But they both came home to an airport where nobody said a word to them.
04:08And now these two were getting handed another war on the other side of the world.
04:13One that would either prove America could still win or finish off what was left of its reputation for good.
04:19Cuz on August 5th, 1990, President George H.W. Bush stepped out onto the White House lawn and said four
04:26words.
04:27This will not stand.
04:29So two days later, Operation Desert Shield started.
04:33Defense Secretary Dick Cheney flew to Saudi Arabia with spy photos of Iraqi divisions parked on the border.
04:39And got King Fahd to allow the U.S. Army onto Saudi soil.
04:43And then came the biggest moving job since D-Day.
04:47Cuz over six months, America shipped roughly half a million people to the other side of the planet.
04:53And 35 nations signed on too.
04:55But Powell had one rule.
04:57And it came straight out of Vietnam.
05:00Don't go in unless you've got enough firepower to guarantee victory.
05:04So he kept asking for more.
05:06And when somebody asked him what the plan for the Iraqi army was, he said,
05:11First, we're gonna cut it off.
05:12Then we're gonna kill it.
05:14But back home, America was not on board.
05:17Cuz Congress argued for months.
05:20And generals testified that sanctions needed more time.
05:23So when the Senate finally voted to authorize the war on January 12, 1991, it passed 52 to 47.
05:32Five votes.
05:33That's how close this came to never happening at all.
05:36So on November 29, 1990, the U.N. Security Council passed Resolution 678, giving Iraq one deadline.
05:46Get out of Kuwait by January or we make you.
05:49And Saddam broadcasted his answer on every radio in the country.
05:53He promised the world the mother of all battles.
05:56And almost every expert in America agreed with him.
05:59Cuz on paper, Iraq had the fourth largest army on Earth.
06:04We're talking a million men dug into trench lines and minefields with chemical weapons they were not afraid to use.
06:10And Washington was predicting tens of thousands of Americans dead.
06:15So at 2.38 in the morning on January 17, 1991, eight helicopters crossed into Iraq to find out if
06:23that was really true.
06:25Cuz those Apaches came in 50 feet off the sand and blew up two Iraqi early warning radar sites in
06:32the same second,
06:33which tore a 20-mile-wide blind spot on the border.
06:37And minutes later, a plane most Americans had never even seen a picture of,
06:41the F-117 Nighthawk slipped over Baghdad and dropped the first bombs on the city.
06:47And the whole planet watched it live on CNN.
06:51Green tracer fire climbing into the sky over a city,
06:54while three reporters narrated it from a hotel room with the lights off.
06:59The first war we ever saw start in our own living rooms.
07:03That's just crazy.
07:04But that same night, the war took its first American casualty.
07:09Cuz Lieutenant Commander Michael Scott Spiker was flying an F-18 Hornet about 100 miles west of Baghdad when he
07:16went down in the desert.
07:17He was 33.
07:19He had a 3-year-old daughter and a 1-year-old son waiting at home in Jacksonville.
07:24And when the sun came up, search crews found nothing.
07:27No wreck.
07:28No parachute.
07:29No body.
07:30So the Navy listed him as missing.
07:33And nobody could tell his wife anything else.
07:36Remember this guy, cuz we're not quite done with his story.
07:39Iraq started putting captured coalition pilots on TV.
07:43Faces swollen shut from beatings.
07:46Reading statements their captors wrote.
07:48And for a lot of Americans, that was the exact moment this stopped feeling like a video game on the
07:53evening news.
07:54So for 42 days, the air campaign ran around the clock.
07:59Roughly 100,000 flights against bridges, bunkers, power stations, and every road in and out of Kuwait.
08:06But after two straight weeks of getting hammered from the sky, Saddam did the one thing nobody expected.
08:13He attacked, cuz Saddam needed a ground fight.
08:17And he needed it on camera.
08:19But not to win.
08:20He wanted to kill Americans, take prisoners, and find out if the U.S. would fold the second the body
08:26bag showed up.
08:27And he genuinely believed it would.
08:29So, on the night of January 29, 1991, Iraqi armored columns crossed into Saudi Arabia and took an oil town
08:38called Khafji, about 8 miles inside the border.
08:41But Saudi and Qatari troops counterattacked and cleared it out house by house over the next three days.
08:47It cost about 43 coalition dead.
08:5114 of them were airmen shot down in an AC-130 gunship that stayed on station past sunrise.
08:57And 11 were marines killed by their own side.
09:01But Khafji answered Saddam's question.
09:04The U.S. was not backing down.
09:06So, he went with plan B, which was to burn Kuwait down on his way out.
09:11Kaz's engineers started wiring the Kuwaiti oil wells with explosives.
09:15Over 600 of them eventually went up.
09:18And the smoke got so thick, it turned the sky black.
09:21But meanwhile, in total radio silence, two entire American corps slid hundreds of miles west through open desert, way out
09:30past the end of the Iraqi line.
09:32Schwarzkopf called it the Hail Mary.
09:35So, at 4 in the morning on February 24, 1991, after six months of standing around in the sand, half
09:42a million men got the word to go.
09:44And what happened over the next four days would change this entire war.
09:49Kaz, the thing everyone was dreading was the breach.
09:52Iraqi engineers had spent months laying belts of mines, wire, trenches, and burning oil ditches across southern Kuwait.
10:00And every strategist said going through that would be slow and expensive.
10:05But the 1st and 2nd Marine Divisions went straight at it with plows bolted onto the front of their tanks
10:11and were through in hours.
10:13And way out west, the Hail Mary worked perfectly.
10:16Because Iraq had no line out that far.
10:19So, two entire American corps hit nothing but empty desert with nobody to stop them.
10:25And the 101st Airborne flew deep into Iraq on the first day and built a supply base in enemy territory.
10:31So, the Iraqi army started surrendering all at once.
10:35Some units surrendered to tanks.
10:37Some to helicopters.
10:39One group even surrendered to a news crew.
10:41And by the end, the coalition was holding somewhere between 80,000 and 175,000 prisoners.
10:49Because here's the thing about the Iraqi men in those trenches.
10:52Most weren't Republican guard.
10:54They were normal people.
10:56Dumped in the sand by a government they had no love for.
11:00Bombed for 38 straight days.
11:02And dying of thirst.
11:03And a lot of them walked out holding the surrender leaflets we'd dropped on them like it was a golden
11:08ticket home.
11:09Man, they didn't ask to be out there either.
11:13But the real army was still out there.
11:16And we were about to drive right into them.
11:18Because on February 26, 1991, the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment was pushing east into a sandstorm so bad that visibility
11:28dropped to about 400 meters.
11:30And dug out in front of them was the Republican Guard's Tawakalna Division, the best men Iraq had.
11:36And the place they met has no name.
11:39Just a line in the middle of the desert called 73 Easting.
11:43So a young captain named H.R. McMaster came over a low rise with 9 tanks, drove straight into dug
11:50-in T-72s, and attacked.
11:53Because here's what the Iraqis didn't know.
11:56The M1A1 Abrams tanks could see straight through that sandstorm on thermal sites and kill a target from a mile
12:03away.
12:03In 23 minutes, those 9 tanks destroyed 28 tanks, 16 armored carriers, and 30 trucks.
12:11And they didn't lose a single vehicle.
12:14Across the whole fight, the regiment wrecked around 160 tanks.
12:18And it happened again the next day at Medina Ridge and at Norfolk.
12:22The biggest tank battles America had fought since World War II.
12:26And they were over and about the time it takes to eat lunch.
12:29But while all that was happening out in the desert, back behind the lines, the worst of this war was
12:35still to come.
12:36Cuz the 14th Quartermaster Detachment was an Army Reserve Water Purification Unit out of Greensburg, Pennsylvania.
12:43A town of about 17,000 people, 40 minutes outside Pittsburgh.
12:48And these guys weren't career soldiers.
12:51They were normal people.
12:52Reservists.
12:53Teachers.
12:54Mechanics.
12:55A guy who worked at the mall.
12:57A mother of two.
12:58People who put on the uniform one weekend a month.
13:01They landed in Saudi Arabia on February 19, 1991.
13:06And got put up in a converted warehouse in Dharan that was being used as a barracks.
13:11And six days later, a Scud missile came through the roof.
13:1528 Americans were killed.
13:18Around 100 more were wounded.
13:20It was the deadliest single attack on U.S. forces in the entire war.
13:25Out of 69 people in the detachment from Greensburg, 13 were dead and 43 were wounded.
13:32The worst losses any Allied unit took in the entire war.
13:36They had only been in the country for six days.
13:39And back in Greensburg, the town held the funerals almost back to back.
13:44Whole blocks of people who had known each other their entire lives standing in the same cemetery over and over
13:51for days.
13:52The ground war ended three days later.
13:56This town lost so many.
13:58So that same night, the Iraqi army in Kuwait broke and ran.
14:03Because thousands of them piled onto Highway 80, the road north out of Kuwait City toward Basra.
14:09And tanks and stolen vehicles stuffed with everything they looted.
14:12And coalition aircraft cratered both ends of that column and boxed it in.
14:18Then they attacked it for hours.
14:20By morning, there were between 1,400 and 2,000 vehicles burned out on that road.
14:26And the pictures that came off it are some of the most famous images of the 20th century.
14:31And those photos landed on the president's desk.
14:34So Bush had an impossible choice.
14:37On the one hand, keep going, finish the Republican Guard, and be the country that spent a week bombing men
14:44who were running away.
14:45Or on the other hand, stop now and leave Saddam Hussein standing in Baghdad with an army still under him.
14:52And on February 28, 1991, Bush stopped it.
14:57The ground war had lasted 100 hours.
15:00But whether that was mercy or the biggest mistake of the century,
15:04people are still arguing about it because of what happened next.
15:09So on March 3, 1991, the two sides met to sign the terms in a tent at a dirt airstrip
15:15inside a rock called Safwan.
15:17And Schwarzkopf did not show up in a dress uniform.
15:21He came in desert camouflage with no medals on it.
15:24Cause he wanted this to look like work instead of a ceremony.
15:28And he parked Apache gunships in a ring around that tent,
15:31so the Iraqi generals had to walk past every one of them to get inside.
15:35There were no handshakes for the cameras.
15:38They sorted out prisoners, drew lines on a map, and agreed to stop shooting.
15:42But then the Iraqis asked for one small thing.
15:46The bridges were all down.
15:48So they asked if they could keep flying helicopters inside their own country to move officials around.
15:53And Schwarzkopf said yes.
15:56He later called it one of the great regrets of his life.
15:59Because Bush had been saying out loud that the Iraqi people should push Saddam aside themselves.
16:05So in March of 1991, they tried.
16:09Shia communities rose up across the south, and Kurds rose up in the north.
16:14And for a few weeks, it looked like the whole thing might come down.
16:17But it wasn't enough.
16:19The uprisings were crushed in weeks.
16:22And the killing that followed is still being counted out of mass graves today.
16:26And roughly 2 million people ran for the borders, most of them Kurds, into the mountains in the middle of
16:33winter with nothing.
16:34So the coalition went back and put camps into northern Iraq to keep them alive.
16:38And then came the no-fly zones, with American and British pilots flying over Iraq to keep Saddam's air force
16:46on the ground.
16:46They would fly those patrols for 12 more years.
16:50And there was still one more man unaccounted for.
16:54Because Scott Spiker was never found.
16:56Not that spring.
16:58Not that decade.
16:59His wife raised their two kids without ever being told what really happened to their dad.
17:04But on August 2, 2009, Marines in western Iraq followed up on a tip from a local Bedouin,
17:10who said he remembered Iraqis burying an American pilot out in the desert back in 1991.
17:17So they dug.
17:19And they found him.
17:20They identified him from his jawbone.
17:23He'd been out there 18 years.
17:26His kids were three and one when he took off that night.
17:29And they were grown adults when their father came home.
17:32And when the plane landed in Jacksonville, people stood on the overpasses the entire way to the cemetery.
17:3918 years.
17:41Welcome home, sir.
17:42So here's what it cost.
17:45292 coalition troops killed.
17:48And on the other side, nobody really knows.
17:51Estimates for Iraqi military dead run from 20,000 to 50,000.
17:56Thousands of civilians died on top of that.
17:59And then the uprisings happened.
18:01And then there's the number that showed up late.
18:04Because out of roughly 700,000 Americans who served in the Gulf, around 250,000 came home with Gulf War
18:11illness.
18:12A result of anti-nerve gas pills, pesticides, nerve agents, and breathing in burning oil smoke.
18:19And it took the government years to even admit it was real.
18:22But then something happened in America that hadn't happened in a very long time.
18:27Because while the troops were still over there, the yellow ribbon started going up.
18:32On doors.
18:33On mailboxes.
18:34On trees.
18:35On the front of whole buildings.
18:37Entire towns of them.
18:39Tied up before anybody knew how this was actually going to end.
18:42And when the planes came home, the airports were packed.
18:46Strangers clapping.
18:47Kids up on shoulders.
18:49Bands in the terminal.
18:50Then on June 8th, 1991, 8,000 troops marched down Constitution Avenue in the National Victory Celebration.
18:59With tanks and helicopters, and a crowd so big, the subway ran close to 800,000 trips in a single
19:06day.
19:06But look closely at that parade.
19:08Because walking in it was a small group of Vietnam veterans.
19:12Men who came home in 1973 to empty airports and closed doors.
19:18Men who'd spent 18 years being told to keep it to themselves.
19:22And they got to walk down the middle of an American street while the country stood on the curb and
19:27cheered.
19:28And Bush was not being subtle about what that meant.
19:31Because on March 1st, 1991, he said this out loud.
19:35By God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
19:39And the next day, he said the ghost of Vietnam had been buried forever in the desert sands of the
19:45Arabian Peninsula.
19:46But as cool as that sounds, it turned out not to be true.
19:50It wasn't buried.
19:52And the men who fought this one would find that out soon enough.
19:56Because the Gulf War didn't end anything.
19:59It started a clock.
20:00Because Saddam stayed.
20:02The sanctions stayed.
20:04And American troops stayed in Saudi Arabia.
20:07Which made a lot of people in that part of the world very angry.
20:10And that anger had to go somewhere.
20:13But if leaving Saddam Hussein standing in Baghdad feels like a sentence that never got finished,
20:18that's because it wasn't.
20:19And 12 years later, a lot of the same men went back to end it.
20:24From being dragged into war over WMDs,
20:27to fighting in a city rigged with booby traps,
20:30to finding Saddam Hussein hiding in a ditch,
20:33and watching his statue come crashing down.
20:36This is the Iraq War Explained.
20:39So click right here, and let's go finish this thing.
20:42Flappy out.