The Kansas City Star March 12, 2002
Missouri product puts U.S. on target
BY: SCOTT CANON; The Kansas City Star
ST. CHARLES, Mo. - They don't make bombs here. They make bombs smarter.
The readiness of America's bomber force depends much on the pace kept by fewer than two dozen union machinists, paid $16.82 an hour, fitting electronic brains into tail-fin assemblies.
A leading military analyst labels the finished bomb-guidance packages, at roughly $20,000 apiece, a Pentagon "best buy." The country's generals seem to agree. They want the assembly line to boost its output from 1,000 a month to 2,000 or more. And, analysts agree, with good reason.
Teamed with explosives and loaded onto jets, the Boeing-made devices convert bombs previously ruled only by gravity to bombs that glide and use computers to steer. The gadgets feature fins that guide their earthbound flight, are oriented by satellites, and are programmed to hit precise map coordinates.
"It's a revolution," said John Pike of Globalsecurity.org. "It changes the whole calculus."
The Joint Direct Attack Munition, or JDAM, went from being a new-marvel novelty of the 1999 Kosovo war to a centerpiece of precision attacks in Afghanistan. The Navy used so many JDAMs - it nearly ran out of them in Afghanistan, one admiral said - it had to borrow from the Air Force.
Analysts, in fact, say America's readiness for expanding its war on terrorism to Iraq or other countries relates directly to the production rate inside the bland Boeing building in suburban St. Louis. The Pentagon won't comment on its JDAM reserves, but Boeing officials say there is no pressing shortage.
This most precious of war materiel is a sophisticated tail kit that, in 10 minutes, replaces a dumb bomb's do-nothing tail section and makes it into a smart bomb.
In doing so, a JDAM gives a single jet the ability to do the job that required 10 planes or more just a few years ago.
"It depends on your target, but if you want to take out a single point ... what would have taken 50 bombs now takes one," said Robert Sherman, a conventional-weapons expert with the Federation of American Scientists.
The JDAM gains its bearings from the same global positioning system technology that gives directions to the drivers of luxury cars. Then an internal sensor keeps it on track to find its target.
Boeing's defense contract requires that at least half of all JDAM-guided bombs hit within 40 feet of a precise point. In practice, say both the company and outside experts, about nine out of 10 fall in that range, and those that miss tend not to miss by much.
"Previously, if a bomb had a lethal radius" - or kill area - "of 100 feet and an accuracy of 300 feet, well, do the math," Pike said. "You had to send several bombs to do the trick.
"Now, if you have that same lethal radius of 100 feet but you have an accuracy to within 40 feet, two bombs likely get the job done," he said.
That means fewer sorties, less danger for pilots. Likewise, allied ground troops benefit from air strikes more likely to actually hit the enemy.
It hasn't completely solved the problems of bombing. For instance, it currently works for bombs no smaller than 1,000 pounds - explosions too big for some jobs. Sometimes it misses. Innocent people still get hurt.
And even the smartest bomb can't make up for dumb moves by humans. It was a JDAM, for instance, that struck the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia - not because the bomb went off target, but because planners got the target wrong.
At the St. Charles plant, a loading dock takes in an almost constant supply of tail fins from HR Textron and one-use batteries from Eagle-Picher in Joplin, Mo. That Missouri company was cleared this month by the Air Force of charges by a former employee that its testing procedures were shoddy. In white lab coats, "munitions mechanics" from the International Association of Machinists bolt and screw together the parts in stages timed at 10.5 minutes per task. When hiccups such as faulty wiring connections are avoided, the process produces 56 JDAMs a day.
The end product looks no more elaborate than the rear end of a bomb, coddled in foam plastic and vacuum-packed into a foil wrapping. Then, in pairs, the JDAMs are put in olive-colored fiberglass shipping cases roughly the size and shape of a car caddy.
Cranking out about 1,000 a month - even as the company trains more workers to double or triple the output in coming months - the deliveries go primarily to the U.S. Air Force and Navy. Boeing also has a government license to peddle the weapons to almost two dozen other countries. Some have been delivered to the Israelis, and the Italians are waiting on an order.
So far, the deliveries have all been of kits fitted to either 1,000- or 2,000-pound bombs.
On board - whether in the bay of a heavy bomber such as the B-2 or B-52, or under the wing of a smaller plane taking off from an aircraft carrier - a cord is plugged into the side of the JDAM.
That umbilical line keeps the guidance system posted on its whereabouts and can change its target up until the instant of release.
Set free from the plane, the bomb becomes a fast-falling glider. Dropped from a high enough elevation, it can drift to a target 15 miles downrange or hit immediately below. It's steered by the motion of three of its four tail fins.
Unlike the more accurate laser-guided bombs ballyhooed during the Gulf War, no one needs to have the target in view at the time of impact. The jet that releases the bomb, in fact, typically has sped off in another direction well before impact. And while laser-guided bombs need clear weather, the JDAM is as good on a cloudy day or stormy night as it is in the sunshine. Perhaps more importantly, it's a relative bargain - $20,000 each, compared with $100,000 for a laser-guided bomb.
"Our big selling point is our cost," said Robert Algarotti, a spokesman at the St. Charles Boeing plant.
The JDAM saw its first combat in 1999 when American warplanes flew over Serbia and Kosovo, and stealth bombers taking off from western Missouri dropped more than 650. Of those, 89 percent hit within 40 feet of their targets.
Of the roughly 17,000 pieces of ordnance dumped on Afghanistan, about 4,700 have been JDAMs.
Since delivery began in mid-1998, more than 10,000 JDAMs have been made. While that suggests there are thousands left, Pike speculates the JDAM is a commodity in short supply.
"To overthrow Saddam Hussein, I can see us easily going through 10 or 15 thousand very quickly," he said. "And now we've got an inventory in the thousands, when you'd like to see tens of thousands."
Consequently, the military is trying to stretch the idea. Soon, the JDAM will fit 500-pound bombs. For a B-2, for instance, it means a plane can aim for 80 targets on a single mission instead of 16 and expect to hit about 90 percent.
Boeing is among competitors for the so-called small-diameter bomb - an even smaller glide bomb that sprouts wings after its release and travels much farther. That same B-2 carrying 16 JDAMs could stuff its belly with 216 small-diameter bombs.
Pike argues that loading up on such gizmos amounts to multiplying the size of America's warplanes without building a single new jet - and opens the way to save money.
"We can already do a lot more with a lot less than we could in the Gulf War," he said. "At what point do you say we don't need so many planes and start saving money?"
Copyright 2002 The Kansas City Star Co.
