alternatehistory.com

Simple question, but to frame what I'm thinking about, I'll quote from Every Man A Tiger, by Maj. Gen. (Ret.) Chuck Horner, and Tom Clancy. Horner was the overall combined Air Forces commander in Desert Storm, and during the initial buildup was also CENTCOM-forward, meaning he was the actual commander in Saudi Arabia in '91, while Schwarzkopf was in Tampa at the actual CENTCOM HQ.

"On one of their first nights in-country, Horner asked John Yeosock what he had that night to fight with if the Iraqis decided to attack into northern Saudi Arabia. Yeosock reached into his pocket, pulled out a penknife, and opened it's two-inch blade. "That's it," he said.
He wasn't far from wrong.
From the start, air defense was the first order of business. Fortunately, much of this was already in place thanks to...the sale of F-15s and E-3 AWACS to Saudi Arabia. These very aircraft enabled the the safe passage of the giant USAF trasnports vital to the rapid buildup of U.S. forces.
The first deploying forces were F-15 fighters and E-3 AWACS to flesh out the Saudis who had been flying CAPs since the beginning of the crisis. Next time the the aircraft carriers USS Independence and USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, with their attendent battlegroups. Then came the first USAF air-to-ground attack aircraft, F-16s from the 363d TFW at Shaw AFB in the States and others from Europe. A-10 tank busters arrived from Egland AFB, Lousiana, and Myrtle Beach, AFB, South Carolina. All of this was designed to provide enough airpower to blunt an Iraqi thrust, and to devastate their supply lines.
The F-111s and U-2s went to Taif, near Mecca, and the F-117s went to Khamis Mushayt, south of Taif and about thirty miles north of the Yemen border.
The 82nd Airborne Division was first on the ground, but there was no way to move them around except in the limited vehicles they had brought with them and the trucks and rental cars that could be scounged from civilians. Owing to their lack of mobility, not much else could be done with them except to move them out from Dhahran into the desert near the air base, though some element moved up toward the Kuwait border in position to fight delaying actions.
Defenses were dreadfully thin.
In those days, just in case, John Yeosock and Chuck Horner always kept their staff cars filled with gas, with a case of water in the trunk, and in the glove compartment a map of the road to Jeddah-if all else failed, the last ditch fallback."



So...what do you think would've happened had the Iraqi Army gone south after taking Kuwait?
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