Thread by @johnismay

For everyone tweeting on the 30th anniversary of Desert Storm about how brilliant the air campaign was, know that the U.S. did a lot of incredibly stupid things like drop high explosive bombs on chemical weapons depots, such as the one at Al Muthanna

They thought that the explosives in Mk-84s would destroy chemical agent, when all they did was create a giant mess that, today, still has not been cleaned up

They compounded the idiocy by following up the Mk-84s with CBU-87s, thinking that the (very) limited incendiary effects of BLU-97 submunitions would burn up liquid chemical agents. (they did not.)

The icing on the dimly thought-out cake was dropping GATOR mines on chem bunkers to deny the area to Iraqi forces. They just created an even bigger mess

(for the record, I got this straight from one of the retired senior officers who is being so widely quoted and lionized today on social media. I interviewed him Sep. 6, 2017.)

As in any war, pilots drop whatever gets loaded onto their planes -- and that does not necessarily correlate with what munitions are best suited for the mission at hand

As best I can piece together, these are the expenditure numbers for cruise missiles, air munitions (unitary and CBU) and artillery cluster munitions, along with munition shipments to the theater

Uncle Sam left about 4.9 million submunition duds on the ground. They accounted for a significant number of American troops killed and wounded during the war and after the cessation of hostilities. You can read about it here: nytimes.com/2019/12/04/mag…

Talking with retirees who were senior J3 staff officers in XVIII Airborne Corps and VII Corps during the war, they said coordination was poor between air planners and the ground force commanders, leading to maneuver elements heedlessly driving straight into fields of duds

Those same officers recalled Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf screaming at their Corps commanders, demanding they keep pushing faster, faster

The UXO problem the United States created even messed up Schwarzkopf's preferred location for accepting the Iraqi surrender, as mentioned in his memoir:

But hey, crank up the Lee Greenwood and let's have a good feel about all of it, right?