Norman Schwarzkopf: I had been Commander-in-Chief of Central Command for almost two years when the war broke out. My responsibilities were to conduct any military operations that took place in the Horn of Africa, the Middle East and Southwest Asia. You could call it a lucky guess, maybe.
I had studied the area and we had come to the conclusion that the worst-case scenario that we would have to face would be Iraq. I mean, Iraq had the fourth largest army in the world at that time. They had just won major victories against the Iranians. They had modern military equipment. So, when you looked around at the area and said, who is the worst enemy that you’d have to fight over there? It was Iraq. And we said, what’s the worst thing they could do? And that would be sweeping down and deciding to take over all the oil fields. So we decided that if that’s the worst-case scenario, then make sure that we plan to handle the worst-case scenario, and we could handle any lesser scenarios that might come up. So you might say we made a lucky guess and we were right.