China, Russia, and Iran learned a very different lesson from the one the United States learned after the hundred hour-campaign in 1990-1991 to liberate Kuwait from Saddam Hussein. Writer Max Brooks, author of World War Z, put it this way:
Desert Storm was the most disastrous campaign ever fought by the United States—because it taught other countries and non-state actors that the US military is too powerful to beat on the battlefield and thus must be forced to fight elsewhere. To that end, potential adversaries have been thinking creatively about warfare-by-other-means for decades.