Mike Guardia

Iraq’s brutal dictator, Saddam Hussein, was certain that his armed forces – the fourth largest in the world and equipped with large quantities of sophisticated Soviet armor – would make short work of any rescue force that came to liberate Kuwait. He wagered that the Americans would lead a military response against Iraq but that, as he famously quipped, America was “a society that cannot accept 10,000 dead in one battle.” He was confident that after the Americans had suffered a few thousand casualties, they would sue for peace on Iraq’s terms.

During the Cold War, the size and power of the Red Army’s armored and mechanized forces struck fear into strategists in the West. While historians and military analysts now agree that much of Soviet equipment was inferior to NATO’s, Soviet mechanized forces were able to accomplish something their US counterparts never did: the development of a tracked, radar-guided, self-propelled antiaircraft gun (SPAAG) that could keep pace with the heavy armored formations.