War in the Persian Gulf: Glimpses of the Indirect Approach

Abstract

Sir Basil Liddell Hart liked war in the desert. He devoted more space to the North African campaigns than to any other aspect of WW II in his seminal work Strategy. He took pride in the fact that one of the great practitioners of desert warfare. Field Marshal Irwin Rommel, was a student (of sorts) and a master of the indirect approach. The Israelis, who considered Hart a latter-day prophet on war, made good use of the indirect approach in the Sinai. Desert warfare, for Hart, combined the best aspects of mechanized combat with"... an object-lesson in the subtlety and variety of the indirect approach" (hart, Strategy, p.292). with this in mind, it would seem fitting to determine whether the latest desert warriors --- the American commanders in DESERT STORM --- applied any of Captain Hart's military theory to their campaign planning and combat decisionmaking.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Nov 08, 1991
Accession Number
ADA437234

Entities

People

  • William B. Huntington

Organizations

  • National War College

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Abstracts
  • Gulfs
  • Information Operations
  • Joint Military Activities
  • Military Operations
  • National Security
  • Persian Gulf
  • Saudi Arabia
  • Students
  • Universities
  • War Colleges
  • Warfare

Readers

  • Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery.
  • Military History / Militaries and War Studies
  • Military History of the United States in the 20th Century.

Technology Areas

  • Space