Desert Storm, after all, was geared to boot Iraq's 300,000-man army out of occupied Kuwait. The first phase of the air campaign was aimed at Saddam Hussein's air-defense systems, communications network, Scud missiles, chemical and nuclear facilities - the military infrastructure that kept him in control. But the next phases focused on wiping out his army in southern Iraq and Kuwait, including three armored divisions that had buried their tanks under reinforced shelters.

Of the 36,245 strikes mounted over the 43-day air war, 24,430 - nearly two-thirds - were fired at the tank divisions. The weapon of choice was the ancient B-52 bomber - which alone dropped one-third of the air war's 88,500 tons of ordnance in Vietnam-style carpet-bombing raids. (Despite that pounding, only about one-third of Iraq's tanks were destroyed before the land war began.)