When the ground war for Kuwait began on February 24, 1991, the Iraqi military had been preparing for an American amphibious assault for months. Along Kuwait's coastline, Iraqi forces had mined the shallow waters, emplaced artillery, and deployed troops to repel a Marine landing that they were certain was coming. The deception worked. The threat posed by the amphibious force offshore — including USS Tarawa (LHA-1) and the Marines she carried — tied down as many as five Iraqi divisions along the coast while the actual ground assault came overland from the west. Tarawa never put Marines on the beach. She didn't have to. The threat of the landing was itself a weapon.
The Ship
USS Tarawa (LHA-1) is a Tarawa-class amphibious assault ship, commissioned on May 29, 1976, and named for the Battle of Tarawa — the November 1943 assault on the atoll in the Gilbert Islands that cost more than a thousand American lives in seventy-six hours and taught the Marine Corps and Navy everything they needed to know about what amphibious assault against prepared defenses truly required. As the lead ship of her class, Tarawa was the largest purpose-built amphibious ship in American history at her commissioning — a general-purpose assault ship capable of delivering Marines by helicopter, by landing craft, and by surface connector, with her own air wing of helicopters and Harriers, and a well deck for launching amphibious vehicles and craft. She was homeported at San Diego, California.
Desert Shield and Desert Storm
USS Tarawa deployed to the Persian Gulf in the fall of 1990 as part of Operation Desert Shield, the massive buildup of coalition forces following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. As part of the Amphibious Task Force, she carried Marines and worked with the other ships of the force to maintain a credible amphibious threat against the Kuwaiti coastline. The Iraqi military — and Saddam Hussein himself — took the threat seriously. The commitment of resources to coastal defense based on the expected amphibious assault is well documented in postwar analyses, and that commitment of resources weakened the Iraqi defenses that ultimately faced the coalition's overland assault.
Tarawa's Marines were ready to go ashore if ordered. The planning for a Marine assault was real, and the training for it was real, and the Marines who stood ready on her decks were prepared to do it. The decision to execute the ground war overland was a strategic one, not a reflection of any deficiency in the amphibious force. The force did its job by being there, credibly, with the capability and the will to execute the assault.
What Amphibious Power Means
The Gulf War demonstrated something about amphibious power that students of naval history had long understood: the threat of an amphibious assault is sometimes more valuable than the assault itself. A force that must defend hundreds of miles of coastline against a credible landing threat cannot mass its forces for other purposes. It must defend everywhere, because the threat is real everywhere. Tarawa and the amphibious force off Kuwait imposed that constraint on the Iraqi military at a critical moment. The Marines who never went ashore contributed to the outcome of the ground war as surely as the Marines who crossed the berm overland.
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Legacy
USS Tarawa was decommissioned on March 31, 2009, after thirty-three years of service. Her career included Desert Storm, multiple WestPac deployments, and humanitarian operations that demonstrated the amphibious ship's versatility beyond its combat mission. The ship named for one of the hardest amphibious assaults in American history never had to execute the kind of opposed landing that her name commemorated. In the Gulf War, that was exactly right. The threat she posed was more valuable than the assault would have been.