Getting Lucky

I keep thinking that the only way to win in Libya is to get lucky and see the will to resist by the loyalists crack before the will to bomb the loyalists cracks in NATO. We got lucky in the Kosovo War in that all-air offensive, so maybe we can do it again. And then I remembered another intervention where I was worried that we were counting on the enemy cracking with no real plan to actively win the war. And then we won that intervention, too.

I'm talking about President Reagan's intervention during the First Gulf War (also known as the Iran-Iraq War) by flagging Kuwaiti tankers and escorting them through the Persian Gulf to protect them from Iranian attack. Eventually we protected all non-Iranian shipping in the Gulf. It led to shooting between US and Iranian forces and even emboldened the Saudis to directly confront the Iranians in the Gulf.

Yes, we got lucky--Iraq won the war on the ground. Otherwise, our tanker protection convoys in the late 1980s in the Persian Gulf would have been an open-ended commitment with no way of actually going on offense and winning the conflict with Iran, unless we were willing at the very least to take the conflict to Iran itself by bombing Iranian bases to stop the attacks on shipping from taking place.

I remember worrying at the time that we had no way out as long as Iran was willing to keep coming at us. But we escaped this problem because Saddam Hussein's Iraq defeated Iran in the war, making our convoy escorts no longer necessary.

So who defeats the loyalists on the ground in Libya and spares us from the inadequacies of our strategy to win?

A tanker war research paper from the Naval Postgraduate School addresses this here.

My First Gulf War summary, if you are interested.