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Even smart bombs miss their mark sometimes

BY: DAVID TARRANT

Despite improvements in high-tech weaponry since the Gulf War, smart bombs can still act dumb. On Saturday, a guided bomb dropped on Afghanistan missed its target by a mile, hitting a residential area in Kabul and killing up to four civilians, according to the Pentagon. Even the smartest of weapons have limitations, according to military officials and experts.

"Between human error and mechanical glitches, it's not that different from your computer. Think about how often your computer or cell phone glitches," said Jim Lewis, a specialist on information technologies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Civilian casualties are a flash point in this war. The United States, hoping to hold together a fragile coalition in the face of anti-American sentiment, has repeatedly emphasized its goal of limiting civilian casualties by using smart weapons.

With precision, hopefully

Pentagon officials recently said that about 90 percent of the munitions used in Afghanistan were guided munitions. During the Persian Gulf War, when television images of smart bombs dropping down ventilator shafts were a popular feature of Pentagon briefings, only about 10 percent of the munitions used were precision-guided.

Newer precision munitions use the global positioning system - an array of satellites that provides extremely accurate guidance data - to hit their targets. But even with 90 percent accuracy, 100 of every 1,000 bombs dropped will go astray.

"The munitions that are being used tend to be very precise. They are not 100 percent," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said. Each bombing accident will have to be investigated. But there could be several explanations for the incidents, defense experts said. On Tuesday, Pentagon officials confirmed that a U.S. warplane mistakenly dropped 1,000-pound bombs on Red Cross warehouses in Kabul.

The Defense Department said U.S. forces thought the warehouses were part of a complex where the Taliban stored military equipment. Early indications point to a combination of human and technological errors.

Bad intelligence was the likely problem in the bombing of the Red Cross warehouse, said John Pike, a defense analyst with the Alexandria, Va., think tank GlobalSecurity.org. In the case of the bomb that missed its target by a mile, it's possible that at some point the wrong global positioning coordinates were programmed into the bomb, Mr. Pike said.

How it works

To determine a target, defense planners synthesize intelligence information gathered from reconnaissance satellites, spy planes, and other sources. Other planners pinpoint the exact coordinates of the target and relay the information to the aircraft carrier by satellite, Mr. Pike said.

"At some point, after the plan gets to the aircraft carrier, but before the airplane takes off, there's a point at which somebody has to manually type in the coordinates to tell the bomb where it's headed," he said. That could be where the mistake was made, Mr. Pike said.

Random error is also a possible explanation for bombs that go astray. In a small percentage of guided munitions, the guidance system doesn't work at all, said Mr. Lewis, the Center for Strategic and International Studies specialist.

"There could be some interruption or glitch at the last minute that affects the bombs' processing capabilities," Mr. Lewis said. "The bomb could be shaken up or defective - it's a pretty hairy ride into the target - and it could just malfunction. Or there could be interference with the GPS signal at a critical moment."

A mistake could be made at various points in the targeting process, he said. "It sounds like it's very automated. But what actually happens is some analyst, probably in Virginia, has looked at a satellite picture, identified a facility as a target, linked it to the GPS coordinates, and that's programmed into the bomb," Mr. Lewis said.

Smart bombs are believed to hit their targets about 80 percent to 90 percent of the time; dumb bombs hit their targets about 10 percent of the time, Mr. Lewis said. "If you drop 10,000 bombs, and 9,000 of them hit the target as opposed to 1,000 of them, then you're nine times as effective," he said.