Air attacks on Iraq on Jan. 17, 1991 that launched Operation Desert Storm two decades ago gave the world a spectacular look at the high-tech weaponry the United States had developed to thwart a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. The initial air strikes on Baghdad riveted a global television audience. On that first night of the air offensive, reporters with cameras poking from Baghdad hotel windows provided real-time video of Iraqi anti-aircraft guns firing streams of tracer rounds into a blue-black sky randomly lit by the bursts of American precision munitions hitting targets on the city’s perimeter.
Those cameras, however, only caught a tiny slice of the broad combat action raging across Iraq and Kuwait. Cruise missiles fired by warships blasted Iraqi defense complexes and command posts.
