Summary
Complete Guide
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Extract
Moving from A to B.
With hindsight, there is very little doubt that the 1991 Gulf War acted as a first spark in the necessity to deeply overhaul deployment methods. In all fairness, it must be reminded that the Cold War had just come to an end (which incidentally allowed the Gulf War to take place), but minds were still pretty suspicious about how the Russians would handle the new peace situation.
Indeed, the evolution of the Western World's armed forces would have been faster if, instead of a mere first spark, the Gulf War had acted as an outright catalyst. However, as any reform that involves governments, time takes its heavy toll, and as far as the military are concerned, new ways of thinking are often conditioned by a change of generation. Some might find this difficult to accept, but it is a fact. Although the 1991 Gulf War highlighted the need for quick and massive shifting of coalition equipment to Saudi Arabia during Desert Shield, Desert Storm itself turned out to be a relatively conventional war, climatic conditions put aside: there was a clear line with the enemy on the other side of it, and that enemy had to be pushed back within its own national boundaries. The truly new clement there was the close eye of the press on what became known as "collateral damage" and the propaganda that came along for the ride. Then came Bosnia and Kosovo--an entirely different and convoluted pattern. A real jigsaw puzzle in fact, not only where collateral damage was bound to be under even closer scrutiny, but where the risk of fratricide and the complexity of the equipment deployment issue had taken even greater proportions. Then also the former Yugoslavia war probably was the first conflict to reveal the true facts of urban war fare (although Israel and Russia--the latter in Chechnya--both had earlier experience with this new aspect of war). By the end of this war the penny had dropped and the Western World had accepted that the spectre of a secondary aftershock from the Soviet earthquake had vanished for good and could finally turn its mind to the new world order which revealed that deployment methods, equipment and strategies needed a new approach. A key word, or panacea, in this context, could well be flexibility. To better review the new pattern of defence equipment being used today and being developed for tomorrow, this supplement has been divided into the three main services concerned; namely air, naval and ground. The ground vehicles section will not cover the heavy armoured fighting vehicles and tanks as their mobility largely depends on the rather more extraordinary infrastructure they require. Roy Braybrook At the lower end of the scale, the Eads-Casa C-212, powered by two Honeywell TPE...See the full content of this document
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