The Fog of War Never Lifts: Lessons from Desert Storm to Operation Midnight Hammer

When Saddam Hussein’s forces rolled into Kuwait in the summer of 1990, President George H.W. Bush delivered a simple, decisive message: “This will not stand.”

What followed was a masterclass in military might — and a stark reminder that the fog of war extends far beyond the battlefield into the corridors of intelligence analysis.

As Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs at the VA, I found myself thrust into the epicenter of America’s war machine as part of the White House Desert Storm Communication Task Force. My Pentagon counterpart was Pete Williams, who became the face of military briefings during CNN’s early days of 24-hour news coverage. Williams handled the media circus admirably, even as the network operated under the philosophy that would define cable news: “We don’t have to get it right — we have to get it first.”

The term “fake news” hadn’t entered our vocabulary yet, but the phenomenon was alive and well. I watched CNN broadcast from Iraq, cameras focused on a hastily erected sign reading “Baby Milk Plant” in both Arabic and English — pure propaganda theater after an American strike. In war, truth becomes the first casualty, buried beneath layers of propaganda from all sides.

The Veteran Standard

My mission was crystal clear: keep America’s veterans fully informed. There’s no audience more demanding than combat veterans — men and women who’ve earned the right through blood and sacrifice to hold leaders accountable. Armed with First Amendment protections and hard-won credibility, they possess an unerring instinct for separating truth from spin. They know, as the old saying goes, that “the truth is the truth.”

So when a DIA intelligence team recently declared that Operation Midnight Hammer fell short of its objectives — then criminally leaked what appears to be classified battle damage assessments — I experienced a painful case of déjà vu. I’ve seen this movie before, and I know how it ends.

The Tank Kill Controversy

During Desert Storm, we faced an eerily similar intelligence failure. The focus then was body counts — specifically, how many of Saddam’s Soviet-supplied tanks our forces had destroyed. The DIA’s dismissal of our B-2 strike effectiveness today mirrors the same analytical blindness that plagued us thirty years ago.

These intelligence analysts — many of them “cubical commandos” who’ve never heard a shot fired in anger — were using overhead imagery with a fatally flawed methodology. Their standard for a tank kill was brutally simple: unless the turret was blown clean off in a spectacular “jack-in-the-box” explosion, it didn’t count.

What these desk-bound analysts completely missed was the sophisticated lethality of American weapons technology. Our brilliant weapons engineers had developed warheads that used “spall” effects — high-energy physics that created internal heat and shrapnel, killing tank crews instantly without necessarily separating turrets from hulls. Multiple other kill mechanisms could neutralize armor through blast effects and high-energy impact rounds.

The limitation wasn’t in our weapons — it was in overhead intelligence’s ability to assess their effectiveness. A tank sitting motionless with its turret intact but its crew dead didn’t register as a kill in their ledgers.

Fighting the Intelligence War

This methodological disaster created a fierce internal battle within our White House communication task force.

We owed our warriors better than bureaucratic incompetence masquerading as analysis.

If the world has seen President Trump angry, imagine the volcanic fury of the late General “Stormin'” Norman Schwarzkopf when presented with these woefully inadequate intelligence assessments. The CENTCOM commander was, in military parlance, well beyond “the civilized side of livid.” He demanded immediate correction of the intelligence failure, and he got it.

When the fog finally cleared and analytical incompetence was corrected, the true scope of CENTCOM’s devastating effectiveness became apparent: 3,700 of Iraq’s 4,280 main battle tanks had been destroyed — an 86% kill rate that stands as one of the most lopsided military victories in modern warfare.

Midnight Hammer’s True Legacy

That same CENTCOM combat prowess was on full display in Operation Midnight Hammer. The mission was nothing short of world-altering — a precision strike that achieved what pilots call “shack”: bullseye, direct hit, scratch one nuclear site.

The DIA’s dismissive assessment of blast effects and overpressure damage reveals the same analytical blindness that plagued Desert Storm intelligence. They’re using overhead imagery to judge effects they fundamentally don’t understand, missing the sophisticated physics of modern weapons systems.

The fog of war never truly lifts — it simply shifts from the battlefield to the briefing room, where analysts armed with satellite photos and institutional arrogance can undermine victories paid for in blood and precision. Our warriors deserve better.

The truth deserves better.

And the truth is this: when American forces execute their mission with the skill and dedication we witnessed in Operation Midnight Hammer, the world becomes a safer place — regardless of what the cubical commandos might think they see from their desks.

Ed Timperlake served as a Marine Infantry platoon commander and F-4 pilot with two Vietnam Campaign stars, and later as a DOD Inspector General in Iraq.