I see your point but I am addressing bad claims.
Iraq was
NOT weak when it was attacked in 1991.
Yugoslavia was
NOT weak when it was attacked in 1999.
Iraq had established an integrated Air Defense system
before 1991. This system is credited for downing dozens of aircraft of the US-led coalition in 1991. Literally no country in the pan-Islamic bloc had fielded this capability back in the day.
Iraq was well-prepared to fight a war in 1991 but US was even better prepared to fight a war in 1991. US had learned valuable lessons from the Vietnam War (1965 - 1972). These lessons spurred a complete revisit to the American military capability with a shift from conscript recruitment model to volunteer recruitment model and development of a new generation of weapon systems. US created the world's first Digitalized military force with the capacity to conduct network-centric combined arms operations in line with the
American AirLand Battle doctrine 1982.
US-led coalition used a combination of bunker buster precision bombs, cruise missiles, heliborne special forces, and stealthy aircraft
F-117 Nighthawk to degrade Iraqi integrated Air Defense system - a FIRST in the world.
Yugoslavia had created a more survivable integrated Air Defense system
before 1999, this system was shaped by lessons that could be learned from Iraqi experience in 1991. This system was optimized to detect targets like cruise missiles and
F-117. But US
introduced B-2A bomber to degrade Yugoslavian defenses - a FIRST in the world.
Yugoslavia is the
only country in the world to have shot down a stealthy combat aircraft
F-117 in a war with NATO (
Operation Allied Force), and its military equipment and tactics are/were instructive in this regard:
Source: Clean Bombs and Dirty Wars: Air Power in Kosovo and Libya
NOTE: Soviet P-18 Spoon Rest (or
Russian 1RL131 Terek) operates in the
VHF band and its
Chinese derivative is called YLC-8A.
Yugoslavians created some of the earliest known examples of an IMAD setup involving a network of different Russian-origin radar systems including
P-18 operating across
I/D/G/H/VHF bands as a collective.
But
B-2A degraded Yugoslavian defenses to the point of being utterly useless:
During Allied Force, the air war over Serbia, six B-2s conducted 45 sorties out of 9,211 Air Force fighter and bomber sorties in the entire war—less than a half of one percent—but they struck 33 percent of the targets in the first eight weeks of combat.
=> The bottom line is that US was closely studying Soviet defenses and understood how to destroy military capability of both Iraq and Yugoslavia with superior technology and tactics in war. US has created a global surveillance system that allows it to draw huge amounts of information from other countries and decode it to create military solutions.
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Greece and Turkey are more evenly matched of-course.
