The purpose of the paper is to focus on the health and personnel related issues resulting from the 1990/1991 Gulf Conflict, with the key aim of learning from the problems identified. In producing the paper, we attempted to be as open and forthright as possible in examining the health problems experienced by serving personnel, veterans and civilians since the conflict.
The paper identifies what the MOD had already done to improve procedures and assesses how these have been applied to the Iraq deployment (Operation TELIC). In making these assessments it has been acknowledged that during operations it is not always possible to achieve the ideal situation; inevitably, in the heat of battle there will always be some things that do not go as intended.
The aim of this paper is not to seek to attribute blame but to identify how the MOD can do better in future.