‘Inside the Kill Box,’ Operation Desert Storm 10 Years Later

“Inside the Kill Box: Fighting the Gulf War” offers a comprehensive examination of Operation Desert Storm through extensive film clips and interviews with key participants in the conflict.

The two-hour Discovery Channel documentary is airing two days before the 10-year anniversary of the start of the war, which involved more than 700,000 NATO coalition troops (500,000 of them American) pitted against Saddam Hussein’s forces of more than 1 million.

“Inside the Kill Box” begins with Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait on Aug. 1, 1990 and concludes with the end of the hostilities on Feb. 27, 1991, exploring what the Gulf War actually accomplished. The special attempts to show opposing perspectives of the conflict via interviews with former President George Bush; Vice President-elect Dick Cheney, who was then secretary of Defense; Gen. Colin Powell, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, former commander of all coalition forces; Sir Peter De La Billiere, commander of the U.K. forces; and Iraqi leaders--including the former chief of military intelligence, a general and a battalion leader.

Kurt Sayenga, who wrote, directed and produced the project with Martha Adams, talked about the documentary this week from his Los Angeles office.

Question: What is meant by the “kill box”?

Answer: The kill box is a zone of attack. The planners of the air war superimposed a grid over the Kuwait theater of war--that means all of Kuwait and southern Iraq. Then they divided it up into these zones of attack that were 15 miles by 15 miles. They would send airplanes into these attack zones kind of looking for prey.

Also, in tank warfare and ground warfare there is a thing called “kill zones,” where tanks sort of set up lines of defense designed to trap soldiers as they come in. The reason [the kill box] was applied to this war was because there was no geographical marker to go by because so much of it was on the flat, featureless desert.

Q: It was really interesting to hear former President George Bush and Dick Cheney talk about the fact that Kuwait’s oil was one of the reasons we went to war with Iraq.

A: I did 65 interviews with everybody from Bush on down, and I tried to address [the reasons behind going to war]. That’s why there are those two quotes from Bush and Cheney basically saying, “Oh yes, it was for the oil.”

They have taken an interesting tack in the past 10 years. They are singing a much different tune than they did 10 years ago. Ten years ago they were trying to figure out a way to put [the reasons for the war] into public-relations language that would make people accept the war. They were going, “This is wrong. We have to take a stand.” I think that even Bush believed that to an extent that it was the case of a bully attacking a smaller country. But really, bullies attack smaller countries all the time and we don’t do anything about it. It is a different thing when [Kuwait] has $200 billion in assets.

Q: The Gulf War was much more destructive and violent than the images we saw on our TV every day.

A: A lot of Iraqis died, that’s for sure. A couple of hundred Allies died and 700-something were wounded. But on the Iraqi side, nobody to this day knows how many were killed out in the desert. Also, they were deliberately not counting. Schwarzkopf didn’t want it to become like the Vietnam War, where there was a nightly body count on television. So instead, they counted things. They would tell you, “We hit 240 tanks today,” as opposed to, “We probably killed about 10,000 Iraqis.”

The war that people saw on television was very, very carefully monitored and kept under wraps by the military because they had such distrust of the media after Vietnam. So basically they restricted access, so much that all you saw were these video-game images that left people with the impression that it wasn’t even a war. It was just this little game being played overseas. People didn’t see the ground war because the cameras weren’t allowed there.

Most of the [footage] in our show that you see was dug up from things that were finally released that was shot by the actual combat cameramen.

Q: Are the NATO coalition forces guilty of overkill when it came to crushing the Iraqis?

A: Yeah, absolutely. The whole methodology was to hit them as hard as they possibly could, particularly because they were fighting the way they had been trained to fight against the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union had this big strength in numbers and pieces of equipment, much as the Iraqis did.

The difference is that the Soviet army would have put up much more of a struggle than the Iraqis were able to. So the U.S. approach was basically built around hitting fast with incredible force. It’s sort of like if you were in a fight, and you start out by just punching the guy as hard as you can in the nose.

Q: The regular Iraqi army also didn’t seem very well trained.

A: They had plenty of weapons, but they weren’t trained at all. They were all draftees. That was part of Saddam’s strategy. You fill the front lines with all of these conscripts and you assume the invaders will attack into them and get worn out by the fight. Then your good guys, your Republican Guard guys, sweep in. They are all rested and better fighters.

But the fact is, the invaders never got tired out because [the Iraqi soldiers] at the front had been so crushed by the bombing campaign. The role of the air power can’t be underestimated. The ground stuff is much more captivating to watch in this show because it is so much more intense, but the air campaign was definitely the decisive factor.

* “Inside the Kill Box: Fighting the Gulf War” will be shown Sunday at 9 p.m. on the Discovery Channel.