Dive Brief:
-
Sunday will mark the 25th anniversary of the start of Operation Desert Storm, but construction of a planned memorial in Washington has not yet begun.
-
Although Congress approved the building of a memorial in December, it did not allocate funds for the project. The design for a monument is expected to win National Park Service approval, but construction cannot begin until $25 million in private funds is secured, according to the Military Times.
-
The publication noted that the memorial, which will be built at a still-undecided location in the nation’s capital,“ still remains years away from becoming a reality.”
Dive Insight:
To some, the building of a memorial to the Gulf War veterans is two decades overdue.
“Operation Desert Storm/Desert Shield is the largest American war of the 20th century without a memorial,” Scott Stump, CEO of The National Desert Storm Memorial Foundation and a Gulf War veteran, told the Military Times.
But it’s not the only war whose memorial took decades to build: The World War II memorial, for example, opened in 2004, almost 59 years after the war ended.
