January 16, 1991

Gulf War

Coalition forces launch Operation Desert Storm against Iraq and Kuwait

When Bush addressed Americans, the attack had already been under way for about two hours — and the date itself depended on the clock: 16 January in Washington, 17 January over Iraq.

16 January 1991: the order and the announcement

On 16 January 1991 in the United States, President George H. W. Bush directed U.S. forces to begin combat operations against Iraqi forces and military targets in Iraq and occupied Kuwait. Iraq had not withdrawn from Kuwait by the 15 January deadline set under UN Security Council Resolution 678.

At 7 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, while strikes were reaching their targets, the White House announced that the liberation of Kuwait had begun under the code name Operation Desert Storm. Bush told the public that allied aircraft had begun attacking military targets about two hours before his televised address.

Radars first, then a thousand sorties

The opening attack included U.S. Army Apache strikes against Iraqi early-warning radar and the first combat launches of U.S. Navy Tomahawk land-attack missiles. USS San Jacinto fired the first Navy Tomahawk ever launched in combat, at 1:30 a.m. Gulf time.

The opening salvo was 48 missiles, and 114 were launched in three salvos over the first night. More than 1,000 aircraft sorties flew during the first day, 228 of them U.S. Navy combat sorties.

No ground forces, and a date that moves

Bush said explicitly that coalition ground forces were not yet engaged. He identified 28 countries with forces in the Gulf area that night; later summaries commonly count 34 coalition nations, depending on whether a source counts political participants or armed-force contributors.

Operation Desert Shield's defensive deployment had become an active combat campaign across Iraq and Kuwait. On the second night Iraq began launching missiles at Israel in an unsuccessful effort to provoke an Israeli response and fracture the coalition.

Sources

Researched 23 Aug 2026 7 sources 2 audit passes

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →

What the sources leave uncertain

The date crosses time zones. U.S. presidential and Navy records date the order and announcement to 16 January 1991, while it was already the early morning of 17 January in Iraq and the Gulf. Many military histories therefore give 17 January as Desert Storm’s start date.
This sheet retains 16 January because that is the slug’s date and is independently supported by Bush’s directive and U.S. chronology; readers in the theater experienced the opening strikes on 17 January.