Norman Schwarzkopf
General; Commander of Coalition Forces in Gulf War (Operation Desert Storm)
Norman Schwarzkopf commanded the multinational coalition force that liberated Kuwait during Operation Desert Storm in 1991.
Biography
H. Norman Schwarzkopf Jr. (August 22, 1934 – December 27, 2012) was born in Trenton, New Jersey, the son of Herbert Norman Schwarzkopf Sr. — a West Point graduate who had organized the New Jersey State Police and overseen the Lindbergh kidnapping investigation. Norman Jr. grew up partly in Iran, where his father was assigned to help train the Shah's imperial police, and entered West Point in 1952, graduating in 1956.
Schwarzkopf served two tours in Vietnam, both significant in different ways. His first tour (1965–1966) was as an adviser to South Vietnamese airborne units — he won a Silver Star during combat operations and observed firsthand the dysfunction of the early American advisory effort. His second tour (1969–1970) put him in command of an infantry battalion in the Mekong Delta. The experience left him profoundly troubled by what he saw as careless leadership that wasted soldiers' lives, and he documented those concerns in memoirs that were unusually candid for a senior officer.
Through the 1970s and 1980s, Schwarzkopf rose through command and staff assignments, serving in airborne and infantry commands and developing a reputation as a demanding but genuinely concerned commander who took his soldiers' welfare personally. He commanded the 24th Infantry Division and then U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) beginning in 1988 — the command responsible for U.S. military operations across the Middle East and South Asia.
When Iraq invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990, Schwarzkopf commanded the American military response. Operation Desert Shield (August 1990 – January 1991) built a coalition of 34 nations and deployed 700,000 troops to the Arabian Peninsula — the largest military deployment since the Vietnam War. Operation Desert Storm began with 38 days of air strikes (January 17 – February 24, 1991) that systematically destroyed Iraqi command, communications, air defenses, and armored forces. The ground campaign that followed on February 24 lasted 100 hours before a ceasefire. Kuwait was liberated; the Iraqi army was shattered.
Schwarzkopf retired in August 1991, wrote his memoir It Doesn't Take a Hero, and became one of the most respected military figures in America. He died on December 27, 2012, of complications from prostate cancer.
Major Achievements
Commander, Coalition Forces — Operation Desert Storm (1991) Schwarzkopf commanded the 34-nation coalition that expelled Iraqi forces from Kuwait in one of the most decisive military victories in American history — building the coalition, planning the campaign, and executing both the air and ground components.
Operation Desert Storm — Air Campaign (January 17 – February 24, 1991) The 38-day air campaign systematically destroyed Iraqi air defenses, command and control, armored forces, and logistics — reducing Iraqi combat capability by an estimated 50% before the ground war began.
100-Hour Ground War (February 24–28, 1991) Schwarzkopf's famous "Left Hook" — a massive flanking movement through the Iraqi desert, far to the west of the main defensive positions — enveloped and destroyed the Iraqi Republican Guard in four days of fighting, liberating Kuwait with remarkably few American casualties.
Coalition Building The diplomatic achievement of maintaining a functioning 34-nation military coalition — including Arab states fighting alongside Israel's neighbors, and European powers with competing interests — for six months of preparation and a week of combat was itself a remarkable accomplishment.
Memoir: It Doesn't Take a Hero (1992) Schwarzkopf's autobiography, written with Peter Petre, is one of the most candid and insightful accounts of military leadership ever written by an American general — unusually honest about both his failures and the failures of the system around him.
Connection to Academy Values
Schwarzkopf's treatment of soldiers — born from painful Vietnam experience with commanders who didn't care — is the West Point ideal of leadership by example taken to its deepest level. He was famous for walking through hospitals to visit wounded soldiers personally, for remembering the names of NCOs who briefed him, and for a visible, genuine emotional investment in the welfare of his troops that was not performance but character.
His coalition command also illustrated the geopolitical dimension of modern military leadership that West Point increasingly emphasizes: the ability to operate in multinational environments, to manage political relationships as well as military ones, and to understand that in modern warfare the diplomatic achievement of building and maintaining the coalition may be as important as any operational decision.
His candor about Vietnam — in his memoir and in public statements — also reflected the West Point Honor Code at its most challenging application: telling the truth about institutional failures, including the Army's own, even when it is uncomfortable.
