Last year's Persian Gulf war was such a one-sided affair that it's become fashionable in some quarters to minimize the extent of America's military success.
You can argue, as I have, that the Bush administration probably ended the war a few days too early and allowed Saddam Hussein to keep enough of his army to hold on to his job as president of Iraq. And you can argue too, as some have done, about whether America had to get into the gulf war in the first place.But what's probably beyond this kind of Monday morning second-guessing is that America's military forces did the job they were sent over there to do and did it well. That includes not only the men and women who served in the gulf war but most of the controversial high-tech equipment they took with them.
If any more evidence of this was needed, it came recently in the form of an 89-page report on the war issued by the House Armed Services Committee. The thing to keep in mind about this report is that it was a joint effort by the committee's Democrats and Republicans and is probably a lot more objective than the Pentagon's own study of the war issued earlier in April.
The conclusion that jumps out at you from the committee's report - its main thrust, really - is that those high-tech weapons we fretted so much about actually worked. That's right: Those white elephants of the Pentagon weapons procurement process actually turned out to be useful.
I'm talking here about such controversial weapons as the Abrams M1A1 main battle tank and the Bradley Fighting Vehicle. Before the war, critics of these two weapons doubted that they would even work in harsh desert conditions and questioned their effectiveness even if they did.
It turns out that the M1A1 wasn't only exceptionally reliable, but it was so far superior to the Iraqis' top-of-the-line Soviet-made T-72 tanks that the big armor battles in the desert were a walkover for American forces. After sorting out a minor problem with its transmission, the Bradley was equally reliable and quickly became a favorite of front-line armor crews.
Another weapon that was defended by the Armed Services Committee report is the Patriot anti-missile missile. Most of the controversy surrounding the Patriot centers on exaggerated claims by the Pentagon that it was 80 percent effective during the war. The Pentagon has since backed down on that a bit but only a bit. It now says the Patriot was 70 percent effective in Saudi Arabia and 40 percent in Israel, where it was handicapped at first by the wrong computer software.
For a weapons system designed 20 years ago to take on jet planes, not ballistic missiles, and one in its first trial by fire, a 70 percent hit rate can't exactly be considered a failure.
To put America's new high-tech weapons in perspective, the committee report noted that it took an average of 300 bombs to destroy a target during the Vietnam War. In the gulf war, it said, precision-guided weapons were approaching the magical one target-one bomb ratio. That allowed U.S. forces to carry out strategic bombing raids with little collateral damage to nearby civilian buildings.
That's the good news in the committee report.
It had some bad news, too. Most of it involved tactical intelligence, communications gear and mine-sweeping.
What all this means, according to the Armed Services Committee report, is that America's military seems to be headed in the right direction. Unlike Vietnam, and unlike the disastrous attempt to rescue American hostages in Iran in 1979, it seems as if the Pentagon is finally doing something right for a change.
I don't know about you, but that seems like pretty good news to me.