In the summer of 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. President George H.W. Bush said the invasion would not stand and readied the American military for combat action.

Back then, as President Bush’s Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs at the Veterans Administration, I was part of the White House Desert Storm Communication Task Force. My counterpart representing the Department of Defense was Pete Williams, who was designated to be the mainstream media public point person. He did an admirable job in what were the early days of CNN’s 24-hour cable news. The joke about CNN in those days was that their MO was “We don’t have to get it right; we just have to get it first.”

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The term “fake news” had yet to take hold, but one early example was CNN announcing from Iraq that a “baby milk plant” had been targeted, complete with a hastily constructed sign written in Arabic and English. That story remains shrouded in mystery today, but the administration was frustrated with reporter Peter Arnett’s embrace of the Iraqi government’s narrative.

My responsibility on the WH Task Force was to keep American Veterans totally informed. There is no tougher audience than American combat vets who are fully empowered by our great First Amendment with hard-earned insight and credibility to hold all in charge responsible for plans to fight and win while protecting the combat integrity and, as much as humanly possible, the lives of our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines. Veterans have a real instinct for the truth and can readily sniff out lies.

With that background, when CNN’s Natasha Bertrand (who is associated with several stories that proved to be untrue) contended that a Defense Intelligence Agency (“DIA”) team’s battle damage assessment report stated that a criminally-leaked, combat damage assessment of Operation Midnight Hammer revealed that it fell woefully short of the stated, that looked like a repeat of CNN’s anti-military orientation.

The DIA assessment discounting the effects of our B-2 attack is flat out wrong. As Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said, the report was inherently erroneous because using overhead intel did not reveal any information about high-energy overpressure blast flag effects within the site.

The Desert Storm Task Force at the White House Level had a similar problem with a hostile media discounting battlefield valor. During that conflict, for both the air and ground campaigns, they used derivative, overhead Intelligence Community (“IC”) reporting on tank kills.

The IC analysts were often “cubicle commandos” who were not in the combat arena. Their methodology for determining a “kill” in that war was that, unless the turret was blown off, it did not count. This measure was informally known as the “Jack in the Box” effect of a turret toss. What the cubicle commandos didn’t understand were the nasty, pernicious crew-killing warheads that brilliant American weapon technicians produced.

Taking advantage of high-energy physics, our warheads used the “spall“ effect, which created internal heat and shrapnel that mercifully and quickly—but still horrifically—killed Iraqi tank crews. There are several other ways to use high-energy impact rounds and blast effects to accomplish a kill. However, the challenge for declaring a kill was then (and is now) the limitations of overhead intelligence. Based solely on that Jack in the Box metric, if the turret existed, even a fully dead crew was not a “kill.”

That Intel methodological blunder created a major internal battle within our Desert Storm WH communication task force to get the right information to the public. We owed our combat warriors that much. Back then, we heard from our CENTCOM counterparts that the late, absolutely brilliant CENTCOM General “Stormin’” Norman Schwarzkopf, Jr. was well beyond the civilized side of livid and demanded all to sort out the woefully lacking Intel presented at the time.

It was only when the “fog of war” cleared and IC incompetence was corrected that we learned that CENTCOM had taken out 3,700 of the Iraq Army’s 4,280 main battle tanks. That legacy of CENTCOM combat prowess was just demonstrated again in Midnight Hammer. All praise and honor should go to the world-altering, brilliant mission that was truly remarkable in the annals of military history.

Ed Timperlake trained as a Marine Infantry platoon commander, a Marine F-4 pilot with two Vietnam Campaign stars, and was a DOD IG in Iraq.