The Tools of War

BOEING
The F-15E is the latest U.S. warplane to carry the JDAMs

(2 of 3)

In the Gulf War, only a handful of planes could launch only a few guided missiles and accurate bombs at a time. Now virtually the entire armada of U.S. warplanes can dispatch such weapons. For the first time ever, a war can begin with one side able to wipe out, with near impunity, every key enemy building and other fixed target its intelligence has identified. Instead of F-117s buzzing Baghdad with a measly pair of 2,000-lb. laser-guided bombs, as in the 1991 war, the next conflict might start with B-2s over Iraq, each dropping 16 of the 2,000-lb. JDAMs. They would probably be followed by B-1s, each capable of dropping 24 JDAMs on a single pass.

In the Gulf War, notes U.S. Central Command chief Tommy Franks, "we used 10 airframes to a target. Now we assign two targets to an aircraft." The improved efficiency would probably make a new air war in Iraq shorter than the Gulf War's 38 days. Because the JDAM could so effectively cripple Iraq's military, senior Pentagon officials believe the U.S. could topple Saddam with a maximum of 250,000 troops, less than half the number it massed to drive his forces from Kuwait in 1991. The weapon's precision should minimize damage to civilian structures, making post-Saddam Iraq easier to rebuild.

Some war planners are concerned that the JDAM stockpile about 20,000 would be insufficient for a new Iraq war. Thus the Boeing factory outside St. Louis is producing 2,000 kits monthly, and will soon increase production. McPeak says the biggest problem is that intelligence has not kept pace with the precision of the system. Too often JDAMs hit the right coordinates but the wrong targets. That happened in the system's debut during the 1999 Kosovo campaign, when a B-2 dropped three JDAMs on the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. The U.S. bombed the site thinking it was a Yugoslav military office building. Similar debacles have occurred in Afghanistan, where a JDAM, apparently loaded with improper coordinates, last October missed its target, a helicopter, and instead killed four Afghans in a residential area.

What would U.S. forces program the JDAMs to hit in Iraq? Aside from the normal targets suspected weapons facilities that could be safely hit from the air, air-defense installations and command-and-control centers a new air war would take aim at Saddam's palaces and other manifestations of his power, such as television transmission stations. Saddam and his most loyal troops in Baghdad and his hometown of Tikrit would be key targets. "The U.S. is going to be applying some pretty awesome military technology," says Steven Simon, assistant director of London's International Institute of Strategic Studies. "The idea is to kick out the legs of the chair underneath the regime." At least initially, say Pentagon officials, the bulk of the Iraqi military would be out of bounds. According to the current game plan, the U.S. invaders would fire on regular Iraqi army troops only if they attacked first. Washington would rather keep Saddam's army intact so it could help hold the country together in a post-Saddam era.

Targeting Saddam's weapons of mass destruction would be an urgent but delicate task. Though Iraq did not unleash such weapons last time, U.S. war planners take seriously the prospect that Saddam would use them in a war aimed explicitly at removing him. In a letter from the CIA to Congress released last week, the agency said the chance of Saddam's unleashing such weapons against U.S. troops once an invasion begins is "pretty high." That puts such weapons at the top of the Pentagon's hit list.

As a result, six U.S. intelligence satellites the size of city buses are prowling the skies over Iraq every day. Three KH-11 and three Lacrosse satellites are searching for places where Saddam might be producing such weapons, as well as for any signs that he is moving his Scud missiles into launching positions. This intelligence would not only help commanders draft target lists, it would also guide U.S. commandos to the right places once they secreted inside Iraq, something planners foresee in the early hours of a new engagement.

President Bush warned last week that any Iraqi troops who followed orders to use weapons of mass destruction would be "pursued and punished." But the Pentagon is not counting on deterrence alone. Bombing chemical and biological sites would be dicey, however, since blasted facilities could spew poisons hundreds of miles downwind, potentially over U.S. troops or Iraqi civilians. So the U.S. military is weighing the wisdom of attacking deeply buried facilities with "agent defeat" weapons designed to produce a heat so intense it kills the spores in biological weapons and breaks down the poisons in chemical weapons. This would keep toxins from being released into the atmosphere. Pentagon officials say another option would be to try to shut down Iraq's biological and chemical facilities as well as its missile-launch sites with high-powered microwave weapons called "E-bombs," which would fry the computer circuits needed to operate such systems. The U.S. used a similar technology to trigger widespread power failures during the 1999 war with Serbia.