Reuters January 12, 2003
Good intelligence deemed vital to US 'smart' arms
By Will Dunham
WASHINGTON, Jan 12 (Reuters) - On May 7, 1999, a U.S. B-2 stealth bomber flying from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri dropped satellite-guided bombs on a building picked as a prime military target in Belgrade during NATO's Kosovo air campaign.
Joint Direct Attack Munitions, or JDAMs -- "smart" bombs that use Global Positioning System satellites to guide them to a specific longitude and latitude -- scored a bull's-eye hit on their intended target, inflicting severe damage.
But the bombs were the only smart ones that day.
The building they struck was not one involved in Yugoslav military imports and exports, as U.S. commanders had believed. It was the Chinese Embassy. The mistake killed three Chinese citizens and remains a sore spot in Sino-American relations.
"That turned out to be one of the most accurate strikes of the whole Kosovo campaign," said Michael Russell Rip, an expert on precision-guided weapons at Michigan State University.
The strike represented a triumph of technology -- smart bombs nailing a chosen target exactly as planned; it also represented a monumental blunder of intelligence -- the Central Intelligence Agency picking the wrong building, Rip said.
As the United States builds up its forces for a possible war with Iraq, the embassy bombing serves as a cautionary tale about the high-tech weapons on which American forces would rely in any second Gulf War, military analysts said.
The lesson, analysts said, is that good intelligence -- for example, knowing with certainty the location of key enemy targets or the function of a particular building or bunker -- is more vital than ever for a military wielding weapons billed as being able to hit any spot on the planet.
"I think it is self-evidently true that your munitions can be no more precise than your intelligence is," said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a military think tank.
'THE APPETITE IS INSATIABLE'
U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld seemed mindful of that fact when he was asked by reporters recently if he was comfortable with the quality of intelligence he was getting out of Iraq concerning sites important to the country's leadership and alleged weapons of mass destruction.
"I don't know any user of intelligence that's ever satisfied. The appetite is insatiable," Rumsfeld said. "One wants perfect visibility into everything including ... people's minds, as well as things that aren't even observable because they're underground and are not known completely."
Retired U.S. Army Col. Kenneth Allard, a former military intelligence officer, said that even with cutting-edge surveillance technologies, there is no way to replace intelligence gathered the old-fashioned way -- by people.
"It's enormously self-deceptive to think that you can put this blind faith in your technology and assume that it's going to solve all your problems for you," said Allard, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Allard added that "human-based intelligence is the most precious, the most perishable, the hardest to get and the least amenable toward these technical means."
Analysts said a country like Iraq poses tough challenges for gathering information on the ground. At the start of the war in Afghanistan launched after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on America, U.S. special forces troops and CIA operatives were inserted on the ground in part to help gather intelligence and spot targets for warplanes overhead.
The fractured political framework of Afghanistan fostered such a strategy, but that does not exist in Iraq.
"What we're interested in is Baghdad," Pike said. "There are several hundred thousand buildings in Baghdad. We want to destroy a few hundred of them. Well, which few hundred?"
Any war with Iraq is expected to begin with a massive aerial bombardment relying heavily on satellite-guided bombs.
The JDAM actually is a guidance kit that converts free-fall bombs -- the "dumb" variety -- into precision-guided munitions, with a navigation system using satellite data to guide bombs to within yards (metres) of an exact location on the map. This marks an improvement over the laser-guided "smart" bombs used during the 1991 Gulf War that were blinded by clouds or smoke.
Air power advocates proclaim that the U.S. military from the air is 10 times stronger than in the Gulf War.
"For instance, 16 B-2s can do what 1,000 fighters did the first night of Desert Storm," said retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney, a respected former strategic planner.
He added: "It is still dependent upon the accuracy of your intelligence. That's a given. That's not a brilliant point."
U.S. strategists have said that during the Gulf War, one quality that was completely missing was a reconnaissance capability enabling commanders to see what was going on in the field in real time. That deficit may have aided, for example, Iraq's ability to hide its Scud missiles from U.S. warplanes.
McInerney pointed to key advances, citing the Joint Surveillance and Target Attack Radar System, or JSTARS, and two unmanned spy aircraft, Predator and Global Hawk.
Predator is a medium-altitude aircraft whose imagery is provided in real time to front-line soldiers and operational commanders. It is armed with Hellfire missiles. Cruising at very high altitudes, Global Hawk surveys large areas with pinpoint accuracy to give commanders data about enemy location, resources and personnel nearly in real time.
JSTARS are manned aircraft that can circle far from target areas and provide targeting intelligence for attack aircraft.
But some are not impressed.
Rip, co-author of the book "The Precision Revolution," said, "At a time when we have air power that is just intelligence-thirsty, we in fact are at a point in time when we are able to deliver the least."
Copyright © 2003
