In the final analysis, the BDA controversy had nothing to do with the actual success achieved. For in the end it was not the intelligence agencies that would tell Generals Schwarzkopf and Khaled when to start the ground war, it was their gut feelings. Call it intuition, experience, judgment, whatever you like, that is what the commanders were stuck with when they made their life-or-death decision. The decision to send soldiers forward was the province of the commanders, Schwarzkopf and Khaled. That is where it belonged, and they got it right. If they had believed the BDA estimates from Washington, we would have delayed the ground war until after Ramadan. If they had believed their own intelligence count, they might have waited a little longer than they did and perhaps have given Saddam time to put together a diplomatic way to extract his army from the hell of the KTO. But they didn’t do either. In the end, they did what commanders are trained to do. They took the information available, judged it against standards of common sense, swallowed hard, and ordered the troops forward into uncertainty.

In the absolutely final analysis, the ability of Coalition ground forces to defeat the Iraqi Army so rapidly and thoroughly may have had little to do with destroying tanks and artillery. There is powerful evidence from the 88,000 POWs that air’s most significant impact on Iraqi fighting strength was the destruction of morale.

Morale was undermined in several ways. The isolation of the battlefield denied the Iraqi soldier food and water, but he was at the same time worn down by the incessant air attacks, and by the PSYOPS campaign that held out hope in the form of surrender. He was also effectively disarmed, because by the time the ground war started, he and his companions feared going near their vehicles—APCs, tanks, and artillery pieces, which air attacks had made death traps.

So as the ground attack was sweeping the remnants of the Iraqi Army aside, intelligence analysts were still hunched over their overhead photographs of Iraq and Kuwait, trying to count individual tanks and artillery pieces; for these “accountants of war” had no other way to understand airpower, no other way to measure what had happened during the revolution in military actions that was Desert Storm.

There was a second (and related) controversy in February—the prioritization of which units got bombed, when, and how much.