‘Smart’ Weapons Get an ‘A’ Off Libya

It was night over the central Mediterranean, and a U.S. Navy task force of three aircraft carriers, escorted by destroyers and cruisers, was arrayed in a grid stretching from the disputed Gulf of Sidra north more than 100 miles.

Out ahead, F-14 Tomcats and F/A-18 Hornets, the pride of the Navy’s high-tech air arm, were screaming through the black sky, patrolling a perimeter miles beyond the ships and the other airplanes that had roared off the carriers throughout the evening.

Two A-7 Corsairs launched from the carrier Saratoga joined the aerial armada and headed south, until their electronic sensors picked up the radar beam of a Libyan missile-launching site, more than 40 miles away on the shores of the gulf.

Missiles Come Alive

Suddenly, as the airplanes homed in, a high-speed, anti-radiation missile known as HARM came to life under the wings of each A-7. Traveling at twice the speed of sound at least, the weapons locked onto the Libyan radar emission and rode it like a taut wire, each delivering 146 pounds of high explosives to the missile site’s radar antenna.

Despite the apparent direct strike, the complex outside the Libyan town of Surt was back in operation within hours, prompting a second attack. Yet, with new repairs quickly undertaken, the radar was once again operating just a week later.

Still, in the view of Pentagon officials, the HARM missiles--each costing $327,000--did their jobs in the electronically controlled “microwar” that the United States fought with Libya for 17 hours on March 24 and 25.

So, too, did each $1-million Harpoon missile launched against Libyan navy vessels and the EA-6B Prowlers sent aloft to protect American pilots, they say. The Prowlers jammed Libyan radar, scrambled communications and generally interrupted the electronic weapons systems on the ground by sending out a variety of misleading signals.

‘A Handsome Dividend’

“We are often criticized about the sophistication of some of our military equipment, but I would say that certainly . . . sophistication paid a handsome dividend,” said Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

It was during the clash with Libya that the nation’s newest precision weapons were used for the first time, conducting what the military calls “surgical strikes” against strictly defined targets while leaving surrounding areas intact.

But in addition to giving these “smart” weapons a genuine test, the brief operation also provided military planners with a trial of what could be the conventional war of the future, in which pilots, radar operators and battle commanders working as much as 100 miles apart join forces to destroy targets they never see, while remaining farther from enemy fire than has ever been possible.

May Be Just a Footnote

These long-distance “standoff” tactics could not be used in either Grenada or Lebanon, where U.S. forces had their most recent experiences operating in a hostile environment. And indeed, some officials contend that the unique circumstances of the Libyan battle--in which foreign policy objectives were paramount, military objectives were minimal and enemy defenses barely entered the fray--may relegate the clash to a mere footnote in military textbooks.

It was, an Administration official observed, “a microwar with very few planes and very few combatants on our side, and practically nothing on the other side except for a couple of missiles and luckless boats that found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

It was, in other words, a far cry from the nation’s combat experience of the last two decades: American pilots flying over North Vietnam during the 1960s and 1970s were brought down by missiles and anti-aircraft fire as they dived in on Soviet-supplied SAM-2 missile sites to drop their bombs.

“When you’re flying directly at a SAM site to drop iron bombs on it, you’re looking at a lot of problems,” said one military officer, speaking on the condition that he not be identified.

Fired 40 Miles Away

In contrast, a flier in an A-7 attacking Libya last month “didn’t see the missile site,” the officer said. “He punched (the HARM missile) off from 40 or 50 miles out, turned around and left, and it rode the radar beam. The tactics were successful.”

By the time the U.S. air strikes began, Libya had fired at least four SAM-5 missiles, and perhaps as many as a dozen, without endangering an American airplane.

But that surprised few in the Pentagon, according to Donald A. Hicks, under secretary of defense for research and engineering, who contended that the distance of at least 70 miles between the SAMs and their targets represented the weapons’ “very outer range, where they don’t have much poop left.”

When the SAMs were designed in the Soviet Union more than 20 years ago, they were intended to strike high-flying aircraft, such as bombers, or slow-moving, submarine-hunting P-3 Orions--not highly maneuverable, high-speed fighters.

Challenge by Kadafi

So, if Libyan strongman Moammar Kadafi wanted to challenge the U.S. claim that the skies over the gulf and the seas beyond 12 miles from the Libyan shore are international territory, he “had to come to us,” noted Harlan K. Ullman, director of maritime policy studies at Georgetown University’s Center for Strategic and International Studies.

But when Libyan missile boats attempted that during U.S. military exercises March 24, they were met with Harpoon missiles fired from the air by A-6 Intruders and from the sea by the cruiser Yorktown, which contains a prime example of sophisticated electronics, radar and communications systems.

Linked by electronic transmissions to an E-2C Hawkeye on airborne patrol, the Yorktown crew could use information supplied by the airplane or a helicopter equipped with advanced radar antennas to spot potential targets on the ship’s radar screens.

According to the Navy, these “over-the-horizon” radar systems can extend to 300 miles the view of battle commanders, whose visual horizon even in clear weather is limited to seven miles. Conventional radar aboard a ship can extend the view to only about 11 miles.

Sorting Out Details

Yet these distances, and the electronically enhanced vision given to commanders, also can lead to confused results. More than a week after the confrontation with Libya, Pentagon officials still were sorting out the details and expressing uncertainty about how many direct hits were scored and how much damage they did.

Indeed, some concede that the effectiveness of the HARM and Harpoon missiles in leading the nation’s military into a new era of warfare is not certain. “Smart” weapons are heavily--if not entirely--dependent on electronic guidance systems, which can be fooled by the absence of enemy radar emissions or by metallic “chaff,” which can confuse a radar operator with misleading echoes.

“Here’s HARM and here’s Harpoon--and they appeared to work very well. Is that because they are superweapons or because there were no countermeasures?” asked Ullman, a former naval officer.

High Cost, Low Impact

Critics say the HARM missile in particular, which entered the force in 1983, is an expensive weapon for the relatively little damage it can inflict; its light charge gives it only limited impact. In the attack at Surt, the Libyan missile launchers were far enough away to protect them from damage when the radar-emitting antenna suffered the direct strike, according to an Administration official who viewed satellite photographs of the Libyan missile sites.

Even after a hit on the antenna, experts say, little work had to be done to restore the launch complex to operational status. Much of the radar equipment could be kept in a van, which could be driven to the launch complex and plugged in--and antennas are easily replaced.

Thus, according to Ullman, the value of the HARM can be seen not so much in the way it was used in Libya, but rather as “part of a rolling offense that strips away an enemy defense so other systems can penetrate.”

Removing First Impediment

For example, if President Reagan and senior military officials had decided to order the U.S. 6th Fleet to conduct punishing bombing raids on Libyan airfields, industrial sites or oil fields, the missiles’ strikes on the complex at Surt would have removed, at least temporarily, the first impediment.

But, Ullman cautions, “standoff” tactics and weapons are “not a universal solution. To hit elusive targets, or targets over a wide area, ‘smart’ ordnance is not likely to be effective.”

Nonetheless, as the Gulf of Sidra operation was ending, Crowe, the nation’s top military officer, proudly told a news conference: “We operated in an intense electronic environment, but it did not hinder our own operations. We were able to operate, or to work around, the opponents’ electronics and do what we wanted to do.”