Welcome to Headline Wednesday from Dispatch: U.S. Military History Magazine, developed by Trackpads dot com.
Each week, we take one pivotal moment from United States military history and follow it from the first warning signs to the final outcome.
Today we go to the skies over Baghdad in the Gulf War for the story of the opening night of Desert Storm.
Shortly after midnight on 17 January 1991, Baghdad did not look like the start of a conventional air war. The city slipped into blackout as streetlights and neon signs went dark, sirens wailed, and gun crews rushed to their positions around government buildings and key intersections. High above that darkness, the first United States Air Force F-117 stealth fighters moved toward their aim points, their outlines hidden from radars that had watched the Iran–Iraq War for eight bloody years. Inside those cockpits, pilots flew by instrument glow and mission tapes, trusting that the radar beams raking the sky below would sweep right past them without a return. It was a tense kind of invisibility.
On the ground, Iraqi air defenders relied on what they knew best from earlier wars. Searchlights probed the clouds, surface-to-air missile batteries stood ready, and radar-guided guns were layered around ministries, communications hubs, and leadership bunkers in the heart of the capital. They knew an attack was coming because the coalition build-up in Saudi Arabia had been impossible to hide and Saddam Hussein had promised “the mother of all battles” in his speeches. Knowing that something is coming is different from knowing exactly where the first blows will land. As the opening minutes of the air war ticked by, desert radar sites and command posts began to lose contact one after another as stealth-delivered bombs and incoming cruise missiles smashed antennas, power feeds, and hardened bunkers.
From the perspective of an F-117 pilot, the raid unfolded as a series of green symbols on a screen and a calm voice in the headset, counting down to weapons release over a city that barely showed through the night haze. Each turn and altitude change had already been rehearsed in the desert, but now they ended in real explosions against real command centers that had anchored Iraq’s defenses. Inside many of those bunkers, Iraqi officers experienced the same minutes very differently as phones went dead, status screens flickered and then went black, and subordinate units stopped answering calls. Their sense of control narrowed from a national picture to the walls of a single room. That contrast was the hinge between two eras of warfare compressed into a few hours.
What began as a handful of aircraft pressing into a heavily defended capital soon revealed a larger design. The opening night of Desert Storm was not just about putting bombs on Baghdad’s skyline to satisfy political messaging or television cameras. It was a calculated attempt to break the central nervous system of Saddam Hussein’s war machine in the very first hours of the campaign. Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait had given it control over major oil reserves and a stronger grip on the Persian Gulf, raising stakes far beyond the immediate border. For the United States and its coalition partners, regional stability, alliance credibility, and the message sent to other regimes tempted by conquest all rested on how they handled that crisis.
Coalition planners understood that they had to do more than knock out a few flashy air defense sites if they wanted to shape the coming ground fight. Iraq’s command-and-control network linked leadership bunkers in Baghdad to corps headquarters in the field, to air bases, missile units, and armored divisions dug in along the Kuwaiti frontier. If that network remained intact, Iraqi forces could coordinate a stubborn defense of occupied Kuwait, launch counterattacks, or even attempt a spoiling offensive into Saudi Arabia. The same network could be used to direct Scud missile strikes and potentially chemical warheads, raising fears in Israel and other neighboring states and threatening to fracture the coalition that had assembled against Iraq. The nervous system itself had become a target.
Because of that, the first wave of attacks on that January night focused on targets that rarely draw bright circles on standard battle maps. Communications centers, air defense coordination nodes, leadership facilities, and key electrical grids that powered radars and command posts were all assigned to specific aircraft and missiles. Stealth fighters went after the most heavily defended nodes in downtown Baghdad, threading through the radar web toward hardened bunkers and control centers. Cruise missiles launched from ships and submarines hundreds of miles away flew low across desert and sea toward relay stations and radar sites that fed the bigger picture. Conventional strike aircraft, backed by jamming platforms and aerial refueling tankers, moved against air bases and early warning radars outside the capital’s immediate umbrella, widening the damage.
For all its complexity, the logic of that opening design was simple enough to express on a single line in the planning rooms. If you can darken the enemy’s radar screens, confuse their commanders, and isolate their field units before a ground offensive begins, you can reduce your own casualties and shorten the war. On the first night of Desert Storm, that theory was being tested in real time above and around Baghdad, second by second, call by call. The outcome would shape not only the campaign to liberate Kuwait but also the way militaries around the world thought about air power, information, and the opening moves of modern war in the years that followed. That night opened a door that others would study for decades.
The opening shock over Baghdad only makes full sense when you trace it back through the months of preparation that came before. In August 1990, Iraq’s sudden invasion and occupation of Kuwait forced the rapid shift from peacetime posture to crisis. Under the banner of Desert Shield, the United States and a growing coalition began moving aircraft, armor, and troops into Saudi Arabia. Bases that had hosted occasional training deployments turned into crowded hubs with fighters, bombers, tankers, and reconnaissance aircraft parked wingtip to wingtip on hot concrete. Many of those squadrons flowed in from Europe and from the continental United States on a carefully timed schedule that matched aircraft, crews, and supplies. The first night of Desert Storm was being set up in broad daylight months earlier.
As the buildup grew, the mission changed from simply blocking an Iraqi push into Saudi Arabia to figuring out how to drive Iraqi forces out of Kuwait. Planners in Riyadh and Washington understood that a direct ground assault against entrenched divisions, backed by an intact Iraqi Air Force and surface to air missiles, would likely mean heavy casualties. Instead, they designed an offensive air campaign meant to strip away Iraqi advantages before a single armored brigade crossed the line of departure. That meant finding the seams in Iraq’s integrated air defenses, mapping every radar and missile battery that could threaten incoming aircraft. Each site was studied with an eye toward which mix of stealth, jamming, and stand off weapons would have the best chance of silencing it at acceptable risk.
In nearby command centers, the paper and digital backbone of the opening strike took shape. Target folders grew thick as satellite imagery, reconnaissance photographs, and electronic intelligence flowed in from multiple sources. Analysts matched buildings to functions, traced cables and antennas to understand which nodes mattered most, and ranked targets by how much they contributed to Iraq’s ability to sense and direct a fight. By early January 1991, diplomatic deadlines had expired and the air campaign plan was locked in. It would open with attacks on leadership, command and control, and air defenses, then shift toward dismantling Iraqi military power in and around Kuwait. Inside that first phase, the very first night had a special purpose: to punch such a wide hole in Iraq’s perception and coordination that later waves of aircraft could operate in a much more permissive sky.
The way that plan moved from briefing slides to reality spread across the region in carefully timed stages. Before most people in Baghdad heard a siren or saw a television image of anti aircraft fire, attack helicopters were already moving through darkness over western Iraq. Apache gunships, guided by low flying Pave Low helicopters, slipped in at low altitude to attack key early warning radar sites. Those outposts were the eyes that would normally alert the rest of the system to incoming strikes. When missiles from those helicopters slammed into radar dishes and control vans, they created invisible corridors through which other aircraft could pass with less risk. Long before the capital’s gun crews opened up, those isolated radars were burning.
Almost at the same time, cruise missiles climbed from the launchers of ships and submarines far from Iraqi shores. They flew low over water and desert, guided by internal maps and sensors instead of pilots in cockpits. Each missile carried instructions for one aim point, such as a power station that fed a command bunker, a communications hub that tied Baghdad to field armies, or a radar node that controlled surface to air missile batteries. Over the region, airborne warning and control system, A W A C S, aircraft watched the overall picture and directed fighters that stood by to intercept any Iraqi jets trying to climb into the fight. Tankers orbited in safer airspace to keep strike packages fueled as they threaded toward their targets and then turned for home.
Into this layered attack pattern, the F one seventeen stealth fighters slipped toward downtown Baghdad. Each jet followed a carefully calculated route to a specific target, often a hardened leadership facility, an air defense headquarters, or a communications center in the most heavily defended parts of the capital. These were aim points that would have been nearly suicidal for conventional aircraft without massive support. Stealth gave their pilots a narrow window in which radar operators would not see a clear track to cue weapons. Below them, Iraqi gunners heard and felt signs of an attack, but their screens did not display the neat formations they were used to tracking from earlier wars. They sensed danger without seeing the shapes that caused it.
That mismatch between impressions and information drove how defenders reacted. Instead of guiding weapons with precise radar tracks, many batteries fired on flashes, noises, and general suspicion. Tracer rounds clawed at empty patches of sky while surface to air missiles leapt upward without solid locks on their targets. The chaos in the visual picture masked the fact that much of the system’s usual discipline had already been shaken. Meanwhile, electronic warfare aircraft worked to jam, deceive, and overload the radars that still tried to sort order from the noise. These crews did not drop bombs, but they created confusion that made every other attacking aircraft harder to track and kill.
At the edges of the main thrust, conventional strike packages pressed in under that cover of stealth and jamming. Their missions focused on air bases beyond the capital, where they cratered runways and destroyed parked fighters that might otherwise rise to challenge coalition aircraft. Wild Weasel crews hunted surface to air missile, S A M, sites that still radiated, deliberately provoking radar emissions and then firing anti radiation missiles back along those beams. Iraqi fighter pilots who did take off found themselves facing alert coalition fighters guided by clear reports from the A W A C S crews overhead. Several Iraqi jets were shot down in these early engagements, sending a stark signal about the risks of trying to contest the air.
For civilians on the ground in Baghdad, the night resolved into sensory fragments. Sirens wailed, flashes lit building edges, tracer streams arced upward, and distant booms echoed as bombs and missiles detonated. Many could not see the aircraft that were causing the noise and light, only the response from the guns and the glow on the horizon. From the perspective of air planners and crews, that chaos was the outward sign of a coordinated assault on a command system. As the hours passed, more communications nodes went silent, more radar screens blanked out, and more air defense batteries found themselves cut off from higher direction. The integrated network that had been built to present a unified shield began to behave like scattered pieces.
By the time the main wave of the first night’s attacks receded and crews turned back toward their recovery bases, maps and status boards already told a different story than the one seen on television. The coalition had not yet achieved full air supremacy over Iraq, and many guns and radars still remained. Yet a wedge had been driven into Iraq’s ability to see, understand, and direct the fight as a coherent whole. That change did not end the war, but it set the conditions under which the rest of the campaign would unfold. In the days that followed, every strike package and every ground formation moved in a battlespace shaped by what had happened in those first dark hours over Baghdad.
Those first dark hours over Baghdad left marks that were easiest to see in how the Iraqi system behaved. The key shift was not a single spectacular explosion but the way so many critical blows landed in a tight span of time. Iraqi commanders had built their defenses around the belief that they would see large formations of aircraft coming and then mass their fire in response. Instead, damage arrived in fragments: a radar site in western Iraq erased, a power feed to a command bunker severed, an air defense headquarters stunned by a precision hit that punched through its roof. Taken together, over only a few hours, those strikes broke the pattern that Iraq’s leadership depended on to manage a modern war.
Stealth was only one part of that break, though it drew most of the attention later. Cruise missiles arriving from unexpected directions and heights added their own layer of confusion, forcing defenders to react to fleeting tracks that appeared on scopes and then vanished in an impact. Jamming aircraft and anti radar weapons made radar operators think twice about leaving their sets on, because every transmission could invite a guided weapon into their van or bunker. Pilots in conventional strike aircraft flew under this pressure and uncertainty, pressing into airspace where the most dangerous, coordinated threats were already weakened or distracted. The integrated air defense system that Saddam Hussein had spent years building began to look less like a system and more like scattered, unconnected batteries.
On Iraqi maps and in their command posts, the breakdown showed up as silence. Phones that had once connected national command centers to field headquarters and air bases went dead without warning. Radios filled with partial reports, repeated calls, and rumors instead of clear tasking and updates. Some local commanders fought based on what they could see from their own positions, firing on suspected targets and holding ground even when those actions no longer fit into any larger plan. Others waited for orders that never arrived because their higher headquarters were damaged, cut off, or simply overwhelmed. The coalition did not erase every radar, bunker, and communications node in a single night, but it did enough to change how the entire network behaved.
By dawn, Iraq still possessed batteries of guns, missile launchers, and airfields, yet its ability to use them as a single coherent instrument had been sharply reduced. Coalition crews returning to their bases saw that reality on mission debrief charts and status boards. Losses from the opening wave were relatively light for such a deep, ambitious strike against a defended capital and its wider network. Iraqi fighters that did manage to take off found themselves at a disadvantage against alert patrols guided by clear airborne picture reports. Many more aircraft stayed on the ground or were later flown to Iran in an attempt to preserve them from destruction. The air challenge that planners had feared on paper did not fully materialize in the sky.
At the same time, airfields struck in the first waves struggled to recover quickly. Cratered runways limited flight operations, damaged shelters reduced the protection for aircraft that remained, and support facilities needed by maintenance crews were hit by blast and shrapnel. Command centers, communications hubs, and air defense coordination sites that had taken the first night’s blows found it difficult to restore seamless control. Improvised workarounds, backup radios, and alternate facilities could patch some gaps, but they could not recreate the original integrated system under pressure. The result was a defender that still had weapons but could not bring them together with the speed and unity that modern air defense demands.
As the air campaign widened, the pattern set on that first night repeated on a broader scale. Coalition aircraft kept striking command and control nodes, logistical networks, and front line units in Kuwait and southern Iraq. When the ground offensive finally began, armored and mechanized forces still had to close with and defeat Iraqi divisions that had dug in and, in some sectors, chose to resist. Those ground actions were real fights with their own risks. Yet the conditions under which they unfolded were shaped by the earlier air work: Iraqi units often lacked timely information, meaningful air cover, or confident guidance from higher headquarters, while coalition formations moved under a growing sense of air supremacy.
For many military professionals watching around the world, the first night of Desert Storm became a case study in what precision, stealth, and careful target selection could do to a modern state’s nervous system. Air planners and theorists pointed to Baghdad’s darkened command centers and silent networks as proof that an enemy’s ability to see, decide, and coordinate could be attacked directly. Instead of focusing solely on destroying fielded forces, they saw value in striking the connections that made those forces effective. The idea that you could change a campaign by blinding and confusing the opponent, rather than by sheer attrition, gained a powerful example in those opening hours.
At the same time, the war underlined the limits of any opening air campaign. Even after Iraqi command and control had been shaken and its air defenses degraded, ground forces still had to maneuver, breach obstacles, and accept risk to eject Iraqi units from Kuwait. Decisions made after the shooting stopped, about sanctions, postwar order, and future engagements in the region, showed that even a highly effective air and ground campaign did not settle every question. Later conflicts would wrestle with these lessons in different ways, some trying to replicate the “opening shock” and others discovering how hard it was to translate early success into lasting political outcomes. The first night over Baghdad highlighted both what air power could achieve and what it could not finish by itself.
Today, when officers and analysts talk about joint operations, networks, and the vulnerability of information systems, they still reach back to that January night in 1991. The image is not only of tracer fire over a city but of a complex network jolted into partial blindness in a matter of hours. Modern forces depend even more on digital links, satellite communications, and data fusion than the systems targeted in Desert Storm. That dependence promises great power but also exposes new points of failure that planners must protect and adversaries will try to exploit. The story of the opening night of Desert Storm remains a reminder that the first blows in a conflict may land not only on tanks and runways but on the circuits and channels that tie a military together.
This episode of Headline Wednesday has walked through a moment when stealth, precision, and deliberate planning combined to crack a defensive system from the top down. The first night of Desert Storm did not decide the entire war, yet it reshaped the battlespace for every mission and maneuver that followed. For students of military history, staff ride groups, and anyone trying to understand how modern campaigns begin, that night over Baghdad still offers a clear window into the power and limits of air power. Headline Wednesday is developed by Trackpads dot com as part of Dispatch: U.S. Military History Magazine.