Sebastien Roblin
While assembling the coalition that would eject Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1990–1991, one thing American military planners weren’t worried about was Iraq’s Scud-B tactical ballistic missiles. True, Iraq had flung hundreds of the Soviet-designed missiles at Iranian cities during the Iran-Iraq war. But the weapons were derived from Nazi V-2 rockets dating back to World War II, and had difficulty hitting any target smaller than a city. The home-built Al-Hussein Scuds developed by Iraqi engineers cut down the size of the warhead and increased the fuel to afford them greater range, at the expense of killing power and accuracy. Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of the coalition, thought of them as little more than a terror weapon that would inflict negligible military damage.
Nonetheless, when the coalition began its devastating air campaign over Iraq on January 17, 1991, it threw everything from B-52s to F-117 stealth fighters and Tomahawk cruise missiles to blast twenty-eight fixed Scud sites as well as storage areas and factories.
t became clear the following night, however, that the raids had not silenced the ballistic missiles. The Iraqi military also had a fleet of transporter-erector-launcher (TEL) trucks dispersed throughout western and southern Iraq. Dictator Saddam Hussein settled on a strategy designed to undermine the alliance’s political underpinnings. Starting on January 18, Scud missiles began to rain down cities in Saudi Arabia—and Israeli cities, injuring dozens.
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin would normally have responded to such a provocation by flattening portions of Iraq with the Israeli Air Force. But if Saddam succeeded in drawing Israel into the war, this might drive away support from the coalition’s key Arab allies. Thus, the Bush administration pleaded with Rabin to keep his strike planes on the ground and let the coalition deal with Saddam.
But that wasn’t good enough for Tel Aviv—the Israeli government wanted the coalition to demonstrate it was doing everything in its power to eliminate the Scud threat, or else it would take matters into its own own hands. After all, how difficult could it be to destroy a score of large, soft-skinned trucks toting enormous missiles?
The Great Scud Hunt Begins
While two batteries of Patriot surface-to-air missiles were redeployed from Saudi Arabia to shield Israel, American and British warplanes were redirected to hammer Saddam’s Scud force. But this was no easy task: a Scud’s TEL unit could move to a firing position, launch its missile, and then scoot back into hiding before it could be located and destroyed.
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/what-the-great-scud-hunt-tells-about-war-north-korea-22637
