ANTHOLOGY AND ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY                                     47


This is a transcript of the famous "Mother of all briefings," in which General
H.  Norman Schwa~kopf,    Commander in       Chief  U.S. Central  Command,
described to the world on live television how United States and allied forces
routed the Iraqi army.

CENTCOM News Briefing

General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, U.S. Army

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Wednesday, 27 February 1991


    Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.   Thank you for being here.
    I promised some of you a few days ago that as soon as the opportunity
presented itself I would give you a complete rundown on what we were doing,
and more importantly, why we were doing it--the strategy behind what we were
doing.   I've been asked by Secretary [Richard B.] Cheney to do that this
evening, so if you will bear with me, we're going to go through a briefing. I
apologize to the folks over here who won't be able to see the charts, but we're
going to go through a complete briefing of the Operation. (Map 1)
    This goes back to 7 August through 17 January.  As you recall, we started
our deployment on the 7th of August. Basically what we started out against was
a couple of hundred thousand Iraqis that were in the Kuwait theater of
operations. I don't have to remind you all that we brought over, initially,
defensive forces in the form of the tO 1st, the 82d, the 24th Mechanized Infantry
Division, the 3d Armored Cavalry, and in essence, we had them arrayed to the
south, behind the Saudi task force.  Also, there were Arab forces over here in
this area, arrayed in defensive positions.   That, in essence, is the way we
started.
    In the middle of November, the decision was made to increase the force
because, by that time, huge numbers of Iraqi forces had flowed into the area,
and generally in the disposition as they're shown right here. Therefore, we
increased the forces and built up more forces.
    I would tell you that at this time we made a very deliberate decision to align
all of those forces within the boundary looking north towards Kuwait--this being
King Khalid Military City over here.    So we aligned those forces so it very
much looked like they were all aligned directly on the Iraqi position.
    We also, at the time, had a very active naval presence out in the gulf, and
we made sure that everybody understood about that naval presence. One of the
reasons why we did that is it became very apparent to us early on that the Iraqis
were quite concerned about an amphibious operation across the shores to liberate
Kuwait--this being Kuwait City. They put a very, very heavy barrier of infantry
along here, and they proceeded to build an extensive barrier that went all the
way across the border, down and around and up the side of Kuwait.