A global coalition

Thirty-six different nations contributed to the war against Saddam’s Iraq

At the beginning of Operation Desert Storm, Iraq had – on paper – formidable armed forces. It had invaded Kuwait in 1990 with 100,000 men and in 1991 it mobilised all of its reserves that boosted numbers to over 600,000 troops. However, it faced a numerically and technically superior UN coalition that had been formed by the United Nations’ Security Council Resolution 678 in November 1990. Dominated by the United States but including 36 countries, the Coalition was an overwhelmingly huge force of almost one million personnel, thousands of aircraft and tanks and hundreds of ships.

One sense of the scale of the Coalition was the war’s projected costs. The US Department of Defense estimated the cost at $61 million, with America’s allies contributing approximately $54 million. Of the latter sum, the main contributors were Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, while Germany and Japan also provided substantial amounts of money.

In purely military terms, the Coalition was overwhelmingly American with almost 700,000 personnel. By comparison, the second and third biggest pools of manpower, Saudi Arabia and the United Kingdom, contributed approximately 94,000 and 53,000 troops respectively. The

Coalition threw together unlikely allies such as Argentina and Britain who had fiercely clashed during the Falklands War less than ten years before. Middle Eastern and Asian countries, some of whom would become heavily destabilised during the following two decades, also participated. Egypt and Morocco, who had been at war in the 1960s, combined forces while Syria provided approximately 21,000 troops. Even Afghanistan, which had only just concluded the Soviet-afghan War, provided 300 Mujahideen fighters for the Coalition.

Most of the other Coalition allies provided military personnel that numbered in their hundreds with the smallest being Hungary who provided one 40-strong medical team. Perhaps the most surprising ally was the recently unified Germany. Although they were a major financial contributor, the Germans had not undertaken a military role since WWII. Nevertheless, a Bundeswehr Luftwaffe fighter squadron provided logistical support from Turkey, which quietly reintroduced Germany as a military power.

“PERHAPS THE MOST SURPRISING ALLY WAS THE RECENTLY UNIFIED GERMANY”

Secretary of Defence Dick Cheney meets with Sultan bin Abdulaziz Al Saud in Saudi Arabia

Coalition troops from Egypt, France, Oman, Syria and Kuwait stand for a review by King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, 8 March 1991

A multinational group of aircraft from Qatar, France, Canada and the United States fly in formation during Operation Desert Storm