Military Action, Operation Urgent Fury

This paper is a perspective on the military actions that took place on October 1983 during President Ronald Reagan’s administration; this conflict was named Operation Urgent Fury. First we must understand why relations between Grenada and the United States began to deteriorate and understand the communist influence that Cuba and The Soviet Union had in Grenada. The threat posed by the anti-US Marxists to the nearly six hundred American students that lived on Grenada was a danger that we could not allow. The US had a aid the islands in the Caribbean that would be threaten by a communist hold in that area but we had to react immediately and almost to perfection in order to be successful.

The island of Grenada is located in eastern side of the Caribbean and it is of a somewhat oval shape and about 120 square miles in size. In Grenada, English is the predominant language but French Patois is still spoken in many places. Grenadians are mostly black and of Christian faith but a small number of whites can be found on the island due to its Spaniard influence from the times of its discovery by Christopher Columbus. The volcanic terrain and because of its average temperatures of 80 degrees Fahrenheit, Grenada yields a lot of vegetation that consist of mostly of fruits and dense woods. In 1979 Maurice Bishop took power while the island faced hard economic times. Moscow and Havana quickly capitalized of Bishop’s seize of power in the island and within 3 days they sent in Cuban ships full of weapons and building materials. In November 1979 Bishop announced that Grenada would begin the construction of a 10,000 ft runway for a new airport on its southwest island called Point Salines. The issue with building this runway was that Cuba wa...

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...all the mistakes that took place during Operation Urgent Fury, it showed that we need to continue to conduct joint training with all the other branches. The US won the battle in Grenada and showed the world that we can be ready within just hours and assault any needed target very fast. The American people gained a sense of confidence from this conflict and I’m sure that it was a big morale booster for the American Soldiers. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army General John W Vessey, said “We planned the operation in a very short period of time--in about 48 hours. We planned it with insufficient intelligence for the type of operation we wanted to conduct. As a result we probably used more force than we needed to do the job, but the operation went reasonably well....Things did go wrong, but generally the operation was a success. The troops did very well”