Author Description

The mobilization of the Army National Guard for Desert Shield came 40 years to the month after the last big mobilization of the Guard for the Korean War in 1950. Superficially, there were similarities between the outbreak of the two wars. Both occurred in distant countries that the average American would be hard-pressed to locate on a map, and both wars broke out after American diplomats delivered less than clear messages that the threatened nations would be protected by American arms should they be attacked. In both instances, greedy dictators gambled that the American president would not expend American lives for such marginal strategic goals. In both cases, the dictators were badly mistaken. But the parallels between the Korean War and Desert Shield/Desert Storm diverge quickly after that. The Army that achieved a "Certain Victory" during its "Whirlwind War" through Kuwait and Iraq was a completely different organization from the one that struggled to a stalemate in Korea 40 years earlier. The destruction of Task Force Smith revealed the hollowness of the post-World War II Army when it first encountered the North Koreans in the summer of 1950. The Army that deployed to Saudi Arabia in the summer of 1990 was arguably the most combat-ready peacetime fighting force in the nation's history. It was a confident, all-volunteer force that reflected in its realistic training and doctrine the hard-learned lessons of the Vietnam War, and had enjoyed unprecedented growth and modernization during the preceding decade. The incredible logistical success of deploying over 500,000 troops and their equipment in record time into an austere environment was only overshadowed by the mechanized blitz that reduced the Iraqi army "from the fourth-largest army in the world to the second-largest army in Iraq in 100 hours." Invasion * The Roundout Units * The Guard is Called * The Mobilization Begins * Preparing for War * The Fate of the Roundouts * Field Artillery in the Gulf * Life in the