Air War during Desert Storm

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them as a guarantee, they informed civilians of where food drops would be delivered, and they were even used as advertising for other propaganda campaigns such as printing the radio bandwidth of Allied broadcasts in Arabic that could be heard broadcast from other Allied planes(Haulman 6-12).

C-130 aircraft were

outfitted with trailing broadcast antennas and sent into strategic areas to broadcast specific, targeted messages to the civilian and troop populations both (Haulman 10).

One major

drawback or disadvantage to the psychological warfare use of aircraft is that it usually places the delivering aircraft in some degree of exposure to enemy anti-aircraft measures because they usually need to be lower flying to safely deliver the leaflets or to stay within broadcast range if delivering a radio message (Haulman 13).

There was not a great loss of aircraft to

this particular hazard during ODS because leaflets and broadcasts weren’t actually begun until near the end of the air campaign.

By this time much of the Iraqi air defense mechanism

had been destroyed.

There is no doubt that the psychological

efficacy of aircraft during ODS in delivering messages, and the psychological terror of the sudden and accurate attack by stealth aircraft, did much to disintegrate Iraqi morale long before actual ground combat took place. Some areas of operations during ODS that sometimes do not receive the full recognition they deserve for their own use of

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