Operation Desert Storm targeting sessions (1991)

Operation Desert Storm, the U.S.-led coalition campaign against Iraq, ran from January 17 to February 28, 1991. During those six weeks, the Defense Intelligence Agency's remote-viewing unit at Fort Meade was integrated into the wartime intelligence cycle in a way it had not been before. Viewers were tasked daily against current battlefield targets. Their session reports were circulated alongside reporting from overhead imagery, signals intelligence, and human sources.

The released session files from this period describe a small set of recurring targets. Viewers were asked to indicate the location of mobile Scud launchers, particularly in western Iraq, where the launchers were a political and operational priority for the coalition because of their use against Israel and Saudi Arabia. Viewers were asked to describe what Iraqi commanders were doing at specific moments. They were asked to predict whether Iraqi forces would use chemical weapons.

The session reports themselves are preserved in the archive in their working form: hand-drawn sketches, dated and timed, with monitor's notes in the margins. They are some of the few Stargate documents that read like routine intelligence-cycle products rather than research output. They appear to have been printed, distributed, and filed alongside other DIA reporting.

The U.S. intelligence community's own assessment of the program's contribution to Desert Storm is contained in the wrap-up sections of the 1995 American Institutes for Research review. The assessment is brief. It concludes that the remote-viewing unit's reports were taken seriously by analysts who received them but that those reports were not the basis for any specific operational decision that could be identified.

By the end of the war, the unit had been folded back into a research posture under the new STAR GATE umbrella. The Iraq tasking did not produce the operational vindication some of its advocates had expected.