Citation:
Abstract:
In a now–familiar scene, General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, imposing in his desert "battle dress uniform," stood before the press and pointed to the TV on his left. On the screen, a set of bombing crosshairs overlaid a roadbed. Transfixed by the cockpit imagery, the reporters chuckled nervously when someone the general called "the luckiest man in Iraq" drove through the crosshairs. With perfect comic timing, he quipped, "And now, in his rear–view mirror?" as a U.S. precision–guided munition (PGM) detonated, obliterating the road where the driver had just been. According to the Gulf War Air Power Survey, "Few scenes were as vivid on television as the picture of a guided bomb going through a ventilation shaft in an Iraqi office building." A central post–war question was whether such images in fact presaged a new style of combat based on advanced technology: Were we watching the birth of a U.S.–led revolution in military affairs (RMA), or simply slicker packaging of business as usual?