ABSTRACT
The Gulf War of 1990 was the first time since the end of Vietnam that the US undertook a combined arms operation involving numbers of troops in the hundreds of thousands. The Gulf War also marked the point at which many of the Vietnam era junior Officers moved into senior posts of command in a combat setting. John Lewis Gaddis describes the rationale behind graduated response as the desire to have more options than nuclear war or surrender. Gaddis quotes President Kennedy as saying, "We intend to have a wider choice than humiliation or all-out nuclear war". The Military, particularly the Army, saw an additional advantage to the idea of limited war. The intellectual climate that led to the Powell Doctrine saw a reassertion of the idea that war was a moral contest that, by its very nature, was ugly, brutal and stark. Admiral US.
