Word: commandeering
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...fighters he sent aloft, he grounded his 800-plane air force and eventually dispatched 137 of his top-of- the-line combat and transport aircraft to sanctuary in Iran. Allied planes then flew 80,000 sorties virtually unhindered and lost only 36, dramatically fewer than the 200 the coalition command had braced for. Asked how Saddam might have made better use of his multibillion-dollar air force, a U.S. Air Force general says, "Could have flown...
...General Norman Schwarzkopf did not march into Kuwait City last week proclaiming "I have returned," it was for two reasons. One was that he had never been driven out. The second was more important: the U.S. commander of Operation Desert Storm wanted the ravaged Arab capital to be liberated by Arabs -- exiled Kuwaitis as well as Saudis and kindred units in the anti-Iraq coalition. So strongly did Schwarzkopf feel about dramatizing the Arab role that he was expected to pass up any uninvited triumphal visit to Kuwait. In 1944 a jut-jawed General Douglas MacArthur had made a point...
...kind of misadventure that critics had predicted would occur on a wide and bewildering scale once the oddly assorted multinational forces went into battle. Snafus in lines of command, in the coordination of differently trained and equipped soldiers, in attempts to simply speak with one another -- all had been pointed up as potentially fatal pitfalls facing such an ungainly coalition. Yet the so-called AirLand strategy, adopted in the 1980s by NATO as a counter to a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, proved to be more than a knockout military punch. Because NATO relies on a central command of joint...
...Command activities changed from isolated service-based operations -- which in Vietnam had often seemed to permit each service to fight its own war -- to close, integrated cooperation...
Even before the ground campaign began, the war had been won to a greater extent than allied commanders would let themselves hope. It was known that five weeks of bombing had destroyed much of the Iraqis' armor and artillery. But not until coalition soldiers could see the corpses piled in Iraqi trenches and hear surrendering soldiers' tales of starvation and terror did it become obvious how bloodily effective the air campaign had been. One of the key questions about the bombing was how much it had disrupted Iraqi command and communications. The damage turned out to be almost total. Iraqi...