Agence France Presse December 7, 2001
US forces use bombs to try to entomb enemy in caves
By Jim Mannion
US forces hope to entomb al-Qaeda and Taliban forces in the mountains of Afghanistan by using precision-guided weapons to blow up entrances to the caves and tunnels in which they hide, military experts say.
"What you have is 500-pound, 1,000-pound and 2,000-pound bombs that are being very precisely guided into the caves, into the openings," Marine Corps General Peter Pace, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Thursday.
Guiding them to their targets is a job of the US special forces that are on the ground with the opposition forces assaulting the Tora Bora complex in the White Mountains south of Jalalabad, he said. US forces in recent days also have used 3,000-pound television-guided missiles with earth-penetrating warheads against caves for the first time, a defense official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The AGM-142 "Have Nap," developed jointly by the United States and Israel, can be fired from more than 50 miles away and yet use its television seeker to navigate through rugged terrain to its target.
US forces also have available satellite- and laser-guided 2,000-pound and 5,000-pound "bunker-buster" bombs, which have been used against buried Taliban command posts.
The bombs are designed to bore through rock or dirt before exploding.
But experts say they can't penetrate deep enough to reach a deeply buried mountain lair.
"Some of these (earth-penetrating warheads) can do maybe 10 meters. But beyond that they really can't," said Dan Goure, an analyst at the Lexington Institute, a Washington think tank.
"So you'll have a tough time if these guys have done what is typical, which is to dig under the mantle of the hills so that you have essentially the entire mountain above you."
Earth-penetrating bombs also might be used to get past protective blast doors near the mouth of a cave or tunnel, said John Pike, a military researcher with GlobalSecurity.org.
But Pike scoffed at other ideas such as pumping gas into caves or using fuel-air explosives to suck out the oxygen, saying "a lot of this cave fighting stuff is out of Superman movies rather than out of real war."
"The number of special effects and plot gimmicks that are available to movie producers is large relative to the number of things that American military forces are organized, trained and equipped to do," he said.
The problem of deeply buried facilities has been around since the Cold War.
It caught the attention of US military planners in the mid-1990s when US intelligence discovered that Libya was building what they concluded was a huge chemical weapons facility under a mountain at Tarhuna.
The discovery set off alarms because if the Libyans succeeded in building the complex, the only way to destroy it would be with nuclear weapons or a commando assault.
Underground facilities in North Korea, Iraq and other potential US adversaries have added urgency to the problem. But the experts say the Pentagon has not yet come up with an answer.
A proposal to develop miniature nuclear weapons for the task is controversial because it probably would require a resumption of nuclear testing.
"Really there aren't many (options) but putting people into caves," said Goure. "Which means you have to go down there the way we fought cave wars in Vietnam and earlier."
Copyright 2001 Agence France Presse
