Bombs Awry! The Imprecision of Precision-Bombing
By Gar Smith
July 18, 2003
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The Pentagon and the armsmakers promote the idea that US weapons are precise and clinical.
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The US had two competing versions of its attack plan for invading Iraq. One proposed a "precision bombing" campaign that would keep civilian casualties to a minimum; the second was a "Shock and Awe" strategy that would leave the country reeling under the onslaught of thousands of bomb and missile strikes.
You can't have it both ways. In the aftermath of the bombing of Basra, Baghdad and Tikrit, human rights groups demanded to know why so many innocent civilians were blown apart and maimed by our state-of-the-weaponry.
On March 26, a coalition weapon killed 14 civilian shoppers in Baghdad's Al Sha'ab district. Three days later, a US bomb exploded at the al-Nasr market in northwest Baghdad, killing at least 58.
In some cases, the technology simply malfunctioned. This supposedly explains why US Patriot missiles managed to shoot a British Tornado bomber and US Navy Hornet out of the sky and why a number of errant missiles missed Iraq entirely and wound up hitting Syria and Iran (twice). On March 24, a US missile killed five civilians in a bus inside Syria. On March 21, a stray US missile landed on top of an Oil Ministry building inside Iran and, on April 8, a stray US air-to-ground rocket killed a 13-year-old Iranian boy.
Pentagon officials claimed that thousands of "sensitive" potential targets were removed from the target list because they were too close to civilian, cultural or archeological sites. And still, US bombs managed to fall on schools, museums, hospitals and packed civilian marketplaces.
As the US rain of bombs thundered down on non-military targets around Baghdad, one frantic resident speaking live over telephone lines from Baghdad told listeners tuned to Pacifica Radio's "Flashpoints" that US bombs had hit Baghdad University, the National Museum, several hospitals and "the oldest school in the world."
The problem may be that the US used far too many bombs, rockets and missiles than were needed to achieve the stated objective.
Show and Effect
Not only did the US use too many bombs overall, it used too much explosive power in specific instances. In part, this was a result of Pentagon public relations. The DOD had promised to deliver a "shock and awe" spectacle the likes of which the world had never seen.
A new generation of "superbombs" were trotted out for their international debut on the brightly lit stage of nighttime Baghdad. While the Pentagon did not deploy its infamous 21,000-pound MOAB (wryly touted as the "Mother of All Bombs"), some of the weapons used in the assault on the capitol were so large that they left mushroom clouds boiling into the night sky.
When not bombing the bejeezus out of Baghdad, the Pentagon burned through millions of tax dollars conducting a series of spectacular "stunts" to demonstrate its killing prowess. One of the showiest examples involved the destruction of Saddam Hussein's luxurious private yacht, Al-Mansur (The Victor). The 420-foot, $50 million floating-palace was torn apart by allied planes that raked it with sixteen 500-lb, laser-guided bombs.
This costly and unnecessary waste of ammunition also destroyed the yacht's extensive onboard hospital and a large cache of medicine that could have been put to good use treating hundreds of badly injured Iraqi citizens. Similarly, the ship's 12,000-horsepower engine, which could have provided much-needed electricity while the local power-grid was being repaired, was pounded into a smoldering heap of floating scrap.
How Do You Define "Smart"?
When rockets are launched and bombs are dropped, a certain percentage will always go awry.
In the first week of the attack, the US launched some 750 cruise missiles, 15,000 precision-guided "smart" munitions and 7,500 "dumb" bombs. (The Iraqis, by contrast, managed to lob around 14 aging Ababil-100 missiles in the general direction of US encampments in Kuwait.)
The Pentagon officially admits that 10 percent of its "smart" bombs can be expected to fail owing to human error (incorrectly entered targeting commands) or mechanical malfunctions (steering fins failing or falling off). That means 75 cruise missiles (with explosive payloads peaking at 2,000 pounds) were expected to land God-knows-where while as many as 1500 "smart" bombs could go AWOL.
In the 1999 war in Kosovo, only 40 percent of Britain's "smart bombs" hit their targets. During its 12-year bombing campaign against Iraq's air defense facilities, US "smart bombs" managed to hit the Iraqi radar sites a scant half the time. The Washington Post reported that these weapons generally missed their targets by more than 330 feet.
Moron Munitions
The Pentagon initially claimed that 80 percent of the rockets fired in Gulf War II would be "smart" weapons but subsequent figures suggest that as many as 48 percent of the weapons fired in the invasion's first week may have been "moron munitions."
It turns out that there is a fundamental problem with the way the Pentagon measures a "smart" bomb's "IQ." When the Pentagon boasts that a rocket or missile can stirke "within three meters" of its target, the Pentagon is using a standard known as the weapon's "Circular Error Probable" (CEP). But all the CEP guarantees is that the weapon is expected to land within 10 feet of its target half of the time.
Thus, a $1.3 million Tomahawk cruise missile, with a CEP of 10 to 30.5 meters would be expected to strike within 60 to 200 feet of its intended target. And that's the best-case scenario. Put another way, that means that one out of every two cruise missiles will miss its target by at least 200 feet, or two-fifths of a city block.
And even when a weapon hits smack on target, the damage is not limited to a discreet parameter. Scott Kerr, a member of the Christian Peacemaker Team in Iraq during the US bombardment, attests to deadly repercussions of even the most accuracy of these incredibly powerful explosive weapons. In an April 2 article published on ElectronicIraq.net, Kerr called the accuracy of the US bombs "incredible. But," he added, "what people don't realize is that each bombing blows out all the glass from the windows for two or three blocks around the bomb site. That's what's causing most of the injuries."
The blast-effects from the bombs in the modern US arsenal are so intense, Kerr reported, that "these gusts can blow out birthday candles even when the bomb falls several miles away."
JDAM It All to Hell
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| War is never "precise." An innocent victim of the US bombing attack recovers in a Baghdad hospital. Credit: BBC photo. |
The Pentagon's "shock and awe" cavalcade kicked off a day early, on March 19, when four bunker-buster bombs were dropped on an unsuspecting civilian neighborhood where Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was believed to be sheltering. The Iraqi leader apparently left the area several minutes before the bombs arrived, so the costly bomb-drop mainly succeeded in leveling a slew of residential homes and killing an unknown number of innocent Iraqis.
On April 8, the US received a tip that Saddam and sons were meeting in a bunker hidden deep beneath a restaurant in Baghdad's Al-Mansour neighborhood. Without warning, the quiet middleclass area was hit with four 2,000-pound JDAM bunker-busters. The blast decapitated palm trees and swept the top floors off surrounding buildings. Five multistory homes vanished into a smoldering, 40-meter-wide, 20-meter deep crater. The fireball turned most of the 14 civilian victims into what the US military likes to call "a pink mist."
The JDAM (Joint Direct Attack Munition) is a $21,000 (FY 2001 dollars) guidance kit that can be slapped on the tail of a "dumb" bomb to imbue it with precision smarts. Steered by satellite-guided GPS data, a JDAM is said to be accurate to within 13 meters (43 feet) of a target.
Once again, the JDAM is promoted as a "precision" weapon. But, with a miss-range of 43 feet, this means that, at best, a JDAM aimed at one particular house is easily capable of hitting any one of four neighboring homes in a densely settled urban environment.
In another case of high-tech overkill, the US decided to target Saddam's half-brother Barzan Al-Tikriti for assassination. But, instead of dispatching a sniper squad from Special Operations, CentCom sent no less than six JDAM missiles streaking into Barzan's home in Ramadi.
Barzan, who had been placed under house arrest by Saddam, fled Baghdad when the US bombs began to fall. Ironically, Barzan sealed his fate when he called his family in Switzerland to assure them that he was safe. US intelligence intercepted the call and traced it to Barzan's farm.
While the morality and legality of plotting the murder of government officials and familty members may stir a passionate debates between supporters of human rights and proponents of military ends, both sides would doubtless agree on one point: Was it really necessary to use six JDAMs to kill a single human being?
Certainly Boeing, the manufacturer of the JDAMs, was grateful. Every time a Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed-Martin or Raytheon weapon self-destructs, the rain of shrapnel and the screams of the wounded guarantees that a new order for replacements is certain to appear in the next defense spending bill.
A "False Flag" Attack on Kuwait?
One of the strangest incidents of a US weapon striking a civilian target occurred around 1:45 in the morning of March 29 when a missile slammed into the Soug Sharg mall, the largest shopping center in Kuwait.
Pentagon officials and Kuwaiti authorities immediately identified the weapon as an Iraqi Silkworm or Seersucker anti-ship missile fired from the Al Faw Peninsula. The debris, after all, clearly showed Arabic writing. The message was unmistakable: The Iraqis had brutally targeted innocent Kuwaiti. The shock and indignation of this attack served to swing the world's attention away from the deaths of the Iraqis in the markets of Al Sha'ab and al-Nasar.
The next morning, however, the story began to unravel. Initially, the US claimed that Silkworm missiles had a range of 90 to 200 km. In fact, the Silkworm's range is a mere 80 km. The closest missile site on the Faw Peninsula was 120 km east of Kuwait city. The missile that struck Kuwait City came in from the south.
As soldiers began to comb through the wreckage, they were surprised to discover that some additional identification had survived the impact -- a serial number ("5420") that identified the missile as a US Conventional Air Launched Cruise Missile (CALCM).
Further investigation revealed that CALCM 5420 had flown in over Saudi Arabian airspace where it had been picked up and tracked by Saudi military radar. The radar track led investigators to a B-52H, which had launched the missile 40,000 feet over the Red Sea. The B-52 was supposedly engaged in a "routine training flight" between Britain's Royal Air Force Base at Fairford, England and the US airbase at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.
Joe Vialls, an expatriate US military analyst based in Australia, takes up the story at this point. "None of the bomber crewmembers knew where CALCM 5420 was headed, but this is considered quite normal in an age of push-button warfare. All cruise missile guidance systems are programmed by targeting specialists -- normally but not always working for the Pentagon -- either by remote secure data transfer or locally with a computer floppy disc.
"Unlike the usual 'To Saddam With Love' or other crude remarks in English," Vialls writes, "this cruise missile had Arabic writing sprayed on its side at Fairford, with hints to the bomber crew that the target was 'probably' one requested by US Special Operations teams located in Djibouti."
According to Vialls, 5420 had been "modified to carry a conventional warhead under classified contract number F34601-91-C-xxx." Vialls explained that the last three digits were intentionally "deleted for national security reasons and to block my extradition from Australia under the PATRIOT Act."
Because the B-52 bomber was on a "routine" flight well outside the Iraq War Zone, it was not monitored by the Central Command Headquarters in Qatar. As a result, Vialls writes, "General Tommy Franks was, and would forever remain, ignorant of the covert 'strategic' launch of CALCM 5420."
Had CALCM 5420 landed in the midst of the shopping mall, its detonation surely would have caused the first Iraqi atrocity of the conflict. Fortunately, on this occasion as on so many others, the "precision" weapon proved somewhat less than precise: It missed its apparent target and hit an adjacent pier.
Gar Smith, the former editor of Earth Island Journal, currently produces a weekly eco-zine called The-Edge and edits the Environmentalists Against War website.
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