Just two years after the war’s end, the Government Accountability Office reported that M.L.R.S. rockets failed at far higher rates in combat than the Army had advertised, and that dud grenades left over from rocket attacks had killed and wounded at least 16 American troops. An Army report in the early 2000s noted that even though the M.L.R.S. was deployed in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s, “not one rocket was fired because of the lack of precision and potential for collateral damage as well as the high submunition dud rate.” By the 2000s, the Army seemed to be moving away from the old unguided M.L.R.S. rockets all together, and the steel rain myth seemed to go with it.

But it’s now making a comeback. Advocates in recent years have repeatedly and enthusiastically cited the steel-rain myth as they call on the Pentagon to bring back long-range artillery rockets and missiles in the face of rising tensions with Russia and China — and military planners are listening. As the Army looks to invest in an artillery force that was deliberately gutted for much of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s important to look back at the lionization of M.L.R.S. cluster weapons used during the Persian Gulf war and the misconceptions that surround them.

What is this “steel rain” myth, and where did it come from?

On May 9, 1991, the Army’s chief of staff gave a speech at a gathering of senior artillery leaders at Fort Sill, Okla. — the home of Army and Marine Corps artillery. Gen. Carl Vuono, a career artillery officer, was pumping up the troops with tales of how well the Pentagon’s howitzers and ground-fired rockets had performed in the desert sands of Kuwait and Iraq. “It was training that created the skill in artillery batteries to bring such timely and accurate fires on the Iraqis, which they described as ‘steel rain,’” Vuono said.

What’s inaccurate about this story?

Reporters in the region in February 1991 — during the Desert Storm air and artillery campaign that preceded the ground war — wrote that it was American soldiers themselves who were calling their M.L.R.S. rocket attacks “steel rain.” A now-retired Army colonel named Hampton Hite — who as a captain commanded one of the M.L.R.S. batteries firing at Iraqi targets and was briefly interviewed in a Washington Post report about the rocket system — confirmed to The Times in 2017 that his unit (A Battery, 21st Field Artillery) had used the radio call sign “Steel Rain” since the unit was established in 1986. His soldiers would have been using that name on radio networks heard by many troops in other units, and it is possible that those other soldiers conflated that name with the rockets Hite’s battery fired. “I don’t doubt that these Iraqi P.O.W.s didn’t like being on the receiving end of M.L.R.S.,” Hampton said in 2017. “But I know for a fact that ‘steel rain’ didn’t come from them.”

How did the story spread?

Vuono’s speech injected the story directly into the artillery corps’s bloodstream. He was echoed by Maj. Gen. Raphael J. Hallada, the head of Army field artillery at the time. “As recipients of your firepower and also professional admirers,” Hallada wrote in June 1991 for Field Artillery, an Army journal, “the Iraqi enemy prisoners of war spoke of the terrible, pervasive ‘Steel Rain’ of your cannons and rockets.” The name evolved a bit, with one officer calling it “iron rain” in the same journal a few months later, though he still attributed the coining of the term to Iraqi prisoners.