Newsday (New York, NY) October 14, 2001
New Munitions Can Hit Hiding Places
By Lou Dolinar
So-called "bunker buster" bombs, along with new tactics and guidance systems, have the capacity to turn fixed underground facilities into death traps and could be key in the drive to get Osama bin Laden, military experts say.
"No matter how deep, how hard and how cleverly it is built, it is vulnerable," said William Martel, an expert on high-tech weaponry who teaches at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I. "We can destroy it, or cut off its access to the outside world."
Fixed positions like bunkers and caves are uniquely vulnerable as U.S. weaponry increasingly relies on global positioning system satellites, or GPS, to point them within 25 feet of a target. When coordinated via electronic technology, this allows spy drones and special operations forces to scout so-called "aimpoints" well in advance of an attack, then move on. With previous laser-based guidance, airplanes or ground forces had to "paint" the target while the attack was in place.
"It's a lot safer and more efficient for the people on the ground," said Tim Brown, an analyst at GlobalSecurity.org. "If they see a tunnel entrance and bin Laden's head pops out, or there's way too many bodyguards, they can get a bearing with laser designator, upload its GPS coordinates digitally to headquarters and leave." The job changes, he said, from directing fire to collecting aimpoints.
Smaller conventional bombs can be targeted the same way, he said. The Air Force, meanwhile, can go after these targets at its leisure.
The most powerful bunker busters weigh 2 1/2 tons, with their sheer weight and impact velocity driving them as far as 100 feet underground or through as many as 30 feet of concrete before detonation.
Newer models incorporate sophisticated sensors that can detect concrete and cavities as they pass through them, along with programmable detonators to make sure they explode in exactly the right place to maximize damage.
The Soviet Union had nothing comparable in its arsenal when it fought in Afghanistan.
In a typical attack, bunker busters are used to collapse the facility being targeted, Martel said. Smaller precision-guided bombs would then be used as a follow-up to seal entrances and airshafts and to cut communication feeds.
Because of this new technology, the United States believes its own fixed underground facilities, including its North American Aerospace Defense Command operations center at Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado, are vulnerable, which is "why the president headed for the airborne command center rather than underground when the World Trade towers were attacked," Martel said.
The laser-guided versions of the bombs, first used against Saddam Hussein's underground facilities during the Persian Gulf War, are still the most accurate and will hit within 7 to 9 meters of a target half the time. According to Martel, the units destroyed a half-dozen of Hussein's heavily fortified concrete-reinforced bunkers.
Five of the newer GPS-guided bombs, dropped from B-2 bombers on Serbia, wreaked havoc on the underground headquarters of Slobodan Milosevic's national command center at Mount Avila.
The Air Force also has several hundred nuclear bunker busters, B61-11s, in its inventory. They can reach "several hundred meters" underground, according to published reports. Although they are among the least powerful nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal, with an estimated yield of about 500,000 tons of TNT, they nonetheless have been able to replace nuclear weapons yielding 10 million tons of TNT.
Copyright 2001 Newsday, Inc.
