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Terror Fight Gets Smart and Deadly

By Peter Barnes

President Bush and the Pentagon put out a call to defense contractors and tech companies to bring them their best technologies. And as "Tech Live" reports tonight, they are responding.

It's one of the deadliest weapons in the war against terrorism. The BLU-118/B Thermobaric bomb comes loaded with potent new explosives that generate lethal shock waves in enclosed spaces, perfect for attacking caves and tunnels like those found in Afghanistan.

Last September it was experimental. By March US warplanes were dropping it on al Qaeda targets.

"It was a collaborative effort between services, agencies, and industry to bring something that was a basic chemistry state to a fielded system within 90 days," said Ronald Sega, director of defense research and engineering at the Pentagon.

Weapons for a new war

It's the new military: smarter, quicker, and more precise, thanks to weapons systems from smart bombs to unmanned aerial vehicles to battleships in the sky.

"I think we've seen the future of warfare, where you're using mainly smart munitions, where you have digital networks linking a variety of intelligent sensors to battlefield commanders," said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org. "What we're seeing is the culmination of the revolution in military affairs that we saw a preview of in the Gulf War a decade ago."

A special task force of military officials and contractors met eight days after September 11 to identify experimental weapons that could be rushed into production.

They looked at a list of 150 systems. Two days later they chose three of those systems: the thermobaric bomb, bunker-buster bomb technology, and an explosives-detection system.

Despite the success of the crash programs, though, some critics say the Pentagon must still adapt to fight a new kind of war. "Ninety-nine and 44/100ths percent of the pentagon is designed to fight wars, not to fight terrorism," Pike said.