We are all thankful that Operation Desert Storm was prosecuted successfully and with as little loss of American and allied lives as possible, and I supported and applauded what our troops accomplished. In the wake of that campaign, and to prepare for the next conflict, we have an obligation to take a clear-eyed look at how our weapons systems performed.

The previously classified findings of the General Accounting Office report answer some crucial questions, and raise some additional, troubling ones. As it turns out, expensive new weapons systems may have worked, but not as well as the Defense Department or its contractors claimed, and that information has until now been withheld from the taxpayer. For example, the Defense Department and Air Force touted that 80 percent of the bombs dropped by the F-117 stealth fighter hit their targets, but the GAO found that the hit rate ranged between 41 and 60 percent -- information that was classified until now. In the same vein, defense contractors claimed after the war that new sensors enabled fighters to be "all weather" attack aircraft, but the GAO found that they had limited or no ability to detect and identify targets through clouds, haze, humidity, smoke and dust -- another finding that was classified by the Defense Department.

The GAO report documents a pattern of overstated, misleading, inconsistent, or unverifiable claims on the performance of individual, particularly high-technology, weapons systems. The American taxpayer has invested hundreds of billions of dollars in new weapons systems in the last decade and is entitled to information about their performance. Just as important, when we ask the men and women in our armed services to risk their lives, they deserve to be sent into battle with weapons that work as advertised. The weapons used in Desert Storm evidently worked well enough that the military ought to tell the truth about them.

The GAO report also raises some new uncertainties about the exposure of U.S. troops to chemical weapons, and its disclosures deserve further scrutiny.