Can smart bombs make war humane?

ON May 12, 1943, an RAF Liberator patrol bomber dropped a Mark 24 acoustic homing torpedo on German U-boat U-456, driving it to the surface, where it was subsequently sunk by ships escorting a convoy. Another grim statistic in the Battle of the Atlantic - and the start of a new era in the history of war.

Gunpowder, the machine gun, powered flight: all have transformed the way wars have been won and lost throughout the centuries, but none has the potential to make such an impact as the advent of the precision bomb.

Four months after that Liberator attack, seen as the start of the age of the precision weapon, a German bomber sank the Italian battleship Roma using a radio-guided bomb. By the end of the Second World War, both the Allies and the Axis powers had developed weapons guided by radio, radar and television - proto-smart bombs.

Sixty years on, a new generation of smart weapons made up the opening salvo of the war against Iraq. In the early hours of yesterday morning, stealth bombers and cruise missiles, launched from the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, were fired at Baghdad.

Their targets were the most senior members of the Iraqi leadership, including Saddam Hussein and his two sons, Qusay and Uday, after intelligence reports located them in a bunker in the south of the capital. The ability to aim a missile at a particular individual is a far cry from the carpet bombing of Dresden and other German cities in the Second World War.

During the autumn of 1944, only seven per cent of all bombs dropped by the US Eighth Air Force hit within 1,000ft of their target. Smart missiles fired in yesterday's attack on Iraq are accurate to within ten feet.

The advantages of using precision weapons go far beyond the ability to hit a specific target, important though that is. One of the most significant factors, particularly in a war which does not command widespread public support, is reducing the number of civilian casualties, "collateral damage". Far from the days when a single bombing raid could kill thousands of innocents without a public outcry, warfare which is seen as indiscriminate will produce a barrage of negative publicity and turn public opinion implacably against the conflict.

With smart bombs, military and political leaders no longer need fear that launching attacks, even in heavily-populated areas, will lead to large-scale civilian deaths, unless those civilians have been deliberately sited at or near known targets. And one consequence of this is to deter aggressors who may have previously felt that the risk of collateral damage would offer a shield against punitive action.

The higher probability of hitting the target than a non-precision, or "dumb" bomb, also means the target does not have to be repeatedly attacked, reducing the exposure of aircraft to enemy attack.

The rudimentary guided bombs used in the Second World War gave way to the Razon and Tarzon bombs used in the Korean War, in turn superseded by the Soviet Styx, the French Exocet and the Chinese Silkworm missiles.

The arrival of the laser-guided bomb in the 1960s was a revolutionary development in air power, equivalent to the development of the jet engine or the introduction of mid-flight refuelling. By increasing accuracy to within 20ft, it did away with the need to use large flights of aircraft against a single target. First tested in 1968, it finally came into its own on May 13, 1972, when four flights of McDonnell F-4 Phantoms destroyed the Thanh Hoa bridge in North Vietnam with laser-guided bombs.

But it was not until the Gulf War that smart bombs proved their ability to shape the entire course of a conflict. Precision attacks on the opening night of the war effectively destroyed Saddam's air defences and opened up Iraq for conventional forces. During that conflict, precision weapons took out 41 out of 54 key Iraqi bridges in just four weeks.

Precision weapons accounted for just ten per cent of all the US bombs used in the Gulf War, but were credited with causing about 75 per cent of all the serious damage inflicted on the Iraq military. In one night, 40 F-111s destroyed more than 100 armoured vehicles; one unit of Apache helicopters scored 102 hits from 107 Hellfire missiles.

But the difference between the Gulf War and the war against Iraq launched yesterday, is that this time the majority of missiles will be precision weapons, according to Nick Cook, aviation consultant for Jane's Defence Weekly. Indeed, he expects the proportions to be reversed, with 90 per cent of bombs guided, and just ten per cent dumb.

"The key development that has enabled that to happen is the advent of GPS (Global Positioning Satellites) for munitions, which means precision comes at low cost," he says. "Previously, we were talking a minimum of $100,000, probably twice that, for a laser-guided bomb; now you are talking about $20,000 for a GPS tool-kit."

The GPS kit can be strapped on to any 500-2,000lb bomb, turning it into a precision weapon and giving it an advertised accuracy of within ten metres, although in trials this can be as low as about three metres, or ten feet. This kit picks up signals from satellites, in the same way yachtsmen use the signals to find their exact location. One American guided bomb, the JDAM, can lock on to as many as four satellites to get a very precise fix on where it is at any given moment, and uses that information to guide it to its target.

The target's co-ordinates are fed into the weapon, either before it is loaded onto the aircraft or once the aircraft has taken off, and this has already been used to great effect in the attacks on the Taliban and al Qaida in Afghanistan.

"What we saw in Afghanistan was special forces beaming the co-ordinates of pop-up targets - threats which materialise at short-notice - to patrolling B52s. You can then literally type the co-ordinates into one of these bombs and release it," says Mr Cook.

But as well as the accuracy of its guidance system, a precision missile also relies on the accuracy of the information on the location of its target. Electronic listening stations, satellites and spy planes can all be used to pinpoint the position of an individual, through picking up on mobile phone calls or through photographs. The Afghan campaign saw the extensive use of unmanned but armed Predator planes, which fly at around 10,000ft looking for suspicious vehicle movements. Photographs can then be beamed directly to command headquarters, which can then order the Predators to fire their anti-tank Hellfire missiles, reducing the time between spotting a target and firing to a matter of minutes. Although it is not clear how extensively the Predators will be used in Iraq, they have the capacity to isolate individual targets, to a degree inconceivable to previous generations.

Previous military advances have largely concentrated on increasing the amount of damage which can be inflicted by a single strike, but the advent of precision weapons has led to a strategy based on effect rather than annihilation. Instead of destroying large numbers of people, it is about destroying things or specific individuals. When a weapon can be guided so accurately, the number of unnecessary casualties can be vastly reduced. War, that great waste of human life, is becoming significantly more humane.

21/03/2003