Newsday (New York, NY) February 16, 2003
A High-Tech Show of Force; U.S. weapons aimed to 'awe'
By Craig Gordon, WASHINGTON BUREAU
Washington - Among the 3,000 precision-guided bombs meant to open a war on Iraq are expected to be some that unleash massive power but do not kill - microwave bombs designed to render Iraqi commanders figuratively deaf, dumb and blind.
These "e-bombs" flash millions of watts of electricity in a microsecond, like man-made lightning bolts. They are designed to fry the circuitry of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's military computers, radar systems and weapons launchers, leaving commanders isolated and powerless to fight back.
Still largely experimental and untested in battle, the microwave bomb is an example of the high technology likely to be the hallmark of an invasion of Iraq, much in the manner of "smart bombs" in the 1991 Iraq war and the Predator drone last year in Afghanistan.
Smart bombs, a 10th of the munitions dropped in the 1991 Desert Storm campaign, will make up as much as 80 percent this time. U.S military officials say that increase will raise the effective firepower of an air wing by four times, letting it hit as many as 700 targets on a single mission. In Afghanistan, special forces spotters could call in bombing raids in as little as 20 minutes - compared with the 1991 war, when bombing orders were typed up daily and flown to aircraft carriers.
Predator and Global Hawk unmanned planes will give commanders around-the-clock video views of the battlefield, something U.S. officials are counting on to improve their ability to knock out Iraqi missile launchers. That effort in Desert Storm netted no confirmed kills.
Those drones will be joined by two smaller cousins making battlefield debuts - the Army's Shadow drone, and the Marine Corps' 5-pound Dragon Eye, small enough to fit in a backpack.
Some new bombs rely on brute force, such as a 30,000-pound conventional "bunker buster," which is supposed to burrow through 65 feet of concrete to destroy Hussein's underground command centers and weapons storage sites. Another is pure finesse - the "blackout bomb," which rains carbon filaments onto electrical systems to cut power.
"Every facet of the way America wages war has changed over the last decade," said Loren Thompson, a defense analyst for the Washington-based Lexington Institute who has close ties to the Pentagon. "It's much faster now, much more discriminate, much more about moving photons rather than munitions around the battlefield."
All of these advances contribute to what defense officials describe as a key aim of the U.S. war plan - to achieve "rapid dominance" over the Iraqi forces, overwhelming them with such awesome power so rapidly that they realize they have no chance and give up the fight in the first few days.
One of the creators of this "shock and awe" theory of battle, defense analyst Harlan Ullman, compares its desired effect with Japan in World War II, when that nation's fierce resistance crumbled after atomic bombs leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
"Psychologically, they could not appreciate that one bomb from one airplane could create that damage. They went from suicidal in their resistance to passive and benign," said Ullman, a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
"What we want to do is to create in the minds of the Iraqi leadership, and their soldiers, this shock and awe, so that they are so intimidated, made to feel so impotent, so helpless, that they have no choice but to do what we want them to do, so the smartest thing is to say, 'This is hopeless. We quit.'"
Ullman insists an Iraqi campaign, unlike Japan, will use precision weapons and other techniques to minimize civilian casualties and spare Iraqi infrastructure to rebuild the nation.
But even the staunchest advocates of such technological advances caution that they can go only so far without the backing of ground troops to pound Iraqi positions if they put up a fight. Afghanistan showed that precision air power is most effective when there are spotters on the ground to highlight targets.
Urban warfare, a possibility if Hussein's forces dig in around Baghdad, can neutralize the technological advantage by reducing the ability to use smart bombs in such close quarters.
The smart bombs' reliance on global positioning satellites to find their targets potentially makes them vulnerable to low-cost GPS-jamming devices. Even smart bombs can go awry, as in Afghanistan, where a special forces ground controller mistakenly called in his own coordinates to targeters. The bomb went where it was told, killing him and two others.
Battlefield communications and Predator video, which can be fed directly to commanders and targeters aboard AC-130 gunships, chew up massive amounts of bandwidth that is in finite supply. U.S. forces could fly only two Predators over Afghanistan at any one time because of the bandwidth crunch.
The drones themselves are in short supply, even as commanders clamor for them.
And some are skeptical that U.S. commanders would rely on untested weaponry such as a microwave bomb to take out targets as important as Hussein's command and control apparatus. They say the military will rely instead on hundreds of cruise missiles, at $1 million apiece.
"We're just going to level the headquarters anyway, just in case, so it's not going to be nonlethal for long," said retired Army Lt. Col. Piers Wood, a defense analyst with globalsecurity.org, which tracks weapons systems. "The elimination of the headquarters would be too important to the outcome and the success of the operation that you aren't going to have everything rest on the success of this [microwave] weapon, which may or may not work."
The Iraqis have made few technical gains since Desert Storm, but Thompson cited one - the creation of a fiber-optic communications network throughout the country, linking commanders, radar systems and weapons. Ten billion bits of information a second can travel through cable barely the size of a human hair, and fiber-optic networks are hard to tap, giving Hussein added communications capacity that could prove troublesome.
That's where a microwave bomb could come in. Its specific capabilities are classified and the Air Force won't say whether it will be available for an Iraq war, though Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has hinted at its possible use.
Still, Thompson, the defense analyst, doesn't discount the need for a potentially large presence of ground troops to secure Iraqi chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, surround Baghdad and retain control over the country. But he said U.S. technological gains will help tip the balance even more toward the superior U.S. fighting force.
"This is going to be kind of like what the science fiction writers thought the Information Age would be like, and for people like the Iraqis, who aren't part of the Information Age, this is a very hard situation to cope with," Thompson said.
Electronic Warfare
Among the weapons systems the Pentagon is considering for use ina conflict with Iraq is electromagnetic pulse technology, which can be used to paralyze a nation's electronics circuits. How it works:
1) A tube of explosive ordnance is packed inside an expandable copper tube.
2) Instant before detonation, a stator coil is energized by a bank of capacitors, creating a magnetic field.
3) Ordnance is is detonated rear to front. The tube flares out, touching the coil and creating a moving short-circuit.
4) Magnetic field is compressed forward and crates a pulse that surges form the bomb with peak currents of tens of millions of amps.
5) Result could be the dismantling of the enemy's communications systems while rendering the civilian infrastructure, including power plants and transportation networks, non-operational.
SOURCES: www.globalsecurity.org, staff reporting
Bombing by Satellite
Among the weapons-aids the Pentagon is developing that may be used in a conflict with Iraq is the Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) bombing guidance system.
What it is:
*Low-cost bomb guidance kit
*Uses global positioning system (GPS) technology
*Greater accuracy in all weather conditions
*Can be launched from up to 15 miles from target, in low or high altitudes
How it Works:
1) Installed in the tailcones of existing bombs. Target coordinates are preprogrammed into the weapon.
2) When aircraft reaches launch region, weapon is released.
3) Three seconds later, weapon begins satellite acquisition, computing manuevers needed to go from actual position to intended target.
4) Course corrections are made through the tailfins.
SOURCES: Periscope military databases, www.globalsecurity.org
GRAPHIC: Newsday Charts / Illustration / Rod Eyer - 1) Electronic Warfare 2) Bombing by Satellite (see end of text; illustrations not in text database).
Copyright © 2003, Newsday, Inc.
