‘Smart Bombs’ : Computers, Lasers Alter Art of War

Imagine yourself as the weapons officer seated beside the pilot of a high-performance jet fighter zeroing in on its target at 620 m.p.h. You are under attack from anti-aircraft guns throwing out round after round of fire, and surface-to-air missiles are homing in on the heat of your exhaust.

But computers and lasers are at your service. Your computer-guided bombs are built to aim for a point illuminated by an invisible laser beam that you keep trained on the target even as your pilot, evading enemy fire, steers your F-111 through a series of stomach-churning maneuvers.

The aircraft goes into a steep climb, then rolls on its side and dives to 50 feet and accelerates to perhaps 1.2 times the speed of sound. Your body is subjected to a force as great as four Gs; you feel four times heavier than you really are. Through it all, you have to keep the cross hairs of the laser guidance system on the target on your radar scope.

Bombing Revolutionized

It is the kind of spine-rattling maneuver repeated day after day at the Saylor Creek bombing range 30 miles south of Mountain Home Air Force Base in southern Idaho and at two Navy test ranges in Nevada. “Smart bombs”--svelte, aerodynamically designed 2,000-pound bombs bearing miniature computers or even television cameras--are revolutionizing the art of hitting a target on the ground from the air.

The Air Force used its newest high-tech bombs in combat for the first time last April against Libya, to deadly effect. The young fliers who are now learning the art of dropping smart bombs were in elementary school when U.S. bombers were last making daily raids over Vietnam more than 13 years ago.

But, if the new weapons offer greater accuracy and potentially safer flight for air crews, as contended by the Pentagon, there is also a flip side. Smart bombs could rewrite the rules on when the United States resorts to force.

Use May Increase

The easier it is for bomber crews to deliver their lethal cargo accurately and live to tell about it, the easier it will be for a President to order them to do it.

“Nobody wants to see pictures of dead little kids being pulled out of the rubble, and, to the extent one can be sure of avoiding that, that’s going to increase the level of confidence” in the use of force, a senior Senate staff member said.

Without smart bombs, said an Air Force official who asked not to be identified, “the decision never would have been made” to launch the raids against Libya on April 15.

“Anything that gives you accuracy” and can avoid ground defenses “does provide a real temptation,” said Gordon Adams, an author and director of the Defense Budget Project, a private research organization. “It sanitizes the use of force.”

Total accuracy remains a long way off, however. Keeping the laser beam trained on the target is something like playing the world’s most difficult video game while riding in the front car of a gut-wrenching roller coaster. And the technology itself, like the humans who operate it, is fallible.

Although the Libyan raids produced what the Pentagon called “very appreciable damage” to the intended targets--airfields, a terrorist training facility and Moammar Kadafi’s command barracks--they also damaged the French Embassy and other facilities far from the target areas.

Raids Raise Questions

Sources who have seen a classified report of the battle damage are concerned about what it portends for the new weaponry, although they refused to divulge details. “It raises a lot of questions about the emphasis on smart weapons,” one congressional staff member said.

The two minutes during which U.S. warplanes dropped bombs on Libya may provide more than just a valuable lesson in the use of smart bombs. The experience may provide the nation’s civilian leaders “some options they didn’t have before,” said Col. Richard B. Myers, the commandant of the Air Force Fighter Weapons School at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada.

Beyond Libya, the new weapons could have an impact on the balance of power and use of force in Europe, in the view of some students of military operations. Gen. Bernard W. Rogers, chief U.S. commander in Europe, has warned that the dominance of the Warsaw Pact nations in conventional weapons would force the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to resort to nuclear armaments within “a matter of days” in the event of an all-out conflict.

But, said Adams, “as you improve accuracy and range and explosive power, you have expanded the horizons of conventional warfare. You don’t need to imagine going to a nuclear threshold.”

Until the Libya raids, the experience of a Navy pilot flying over southern North Vietnam on a clear July afternoon in 1972 was perhaps more the rule than the exception. Fourteen years later, the incident--just one of 250 sorties this pilot flew over Southeast Asia--still stands out clearly in his memory.

Two 500-Pound Bombs

“We were running the roads looking for trucks and targets of opportunity,” said the pilot, who insisted on anonymity. “There was a 10-ton truck. We thought, ‘Oh, good. This is going to be fun.’ We dropped two 500-pound bombs, one in front and one in the back. The truck slammed to a halt. Three guys jumped out and jumped into a ditch 100 yards down the road.”

The pilot and two others flying A-6 attack jets dropped 16 unguided iron bombs each--48 bombs in all--and encountered no hostile fire.

“We began to make multiple runs, dropping two bombs at a time,” he said. “Nobody got closer than 40 feet from the truck. Thirty or 40 feet is great accuracy,” but the weapons did not severely damage the truck. As the three airplanes turned back, the fliers saw the driver and passengers climb back into their truck and drive away.

Such failures notwithstanding, Navy and Air Force pilots to this day continue to practice the art of dropping unguided “gravity bombs.” Not all situations call for expensive state-of-the-art weapons.

On a recent day here, for example, 2nd Lt. Mark Csoros guided his F-111 bomber 200 feet above the sagebrush and tumbleweed toward a mock-up of a grounded airplane partly hidden behind a dirt embankment. As he flew over the target, Csoros released a red button on the joy stick with his right thumb. An inert practice bomb tumbled away from a pylon beneath the wing as Csoros pulled sharply back on the stick, sending the $30.7-million aircraft into a steep climb. The bomb landed about 40 yards from the target.

Serious Damage Likely

Close enough to do serious damage with a 2,000-pound bomb? “You bet,” said Capt. Steven Bowling, an experienced pilot watching from nearby Pense Butte.

If the air crew had been flying with laser-guided weapons, however, Csoros would have released the bomb about 10 seconds, or about two miles, from his target. Then he would have begun defensive maneuvers as the weapons officer took over the job of guiding the bomb home.

The first generation of laser-guided bombs, known as Paveway I, has already given way to Paveway II, which offers improved maneuverability and longer shelf life. It can be released accurately at a greater distance from the target--as far as three or four miles--and its higher release speed allows pilots to engage in low-level bombings to avoid anti-aircraft fire while flying at nearly the speed of sound.

The laser beam that directs the bomb can be aimed at the target either by soldiers on the ground or by an air crew flying in the bomber or another aircraft. The weapons officer, wherever he is situated, spots his prey by matching infrared images from the ground with satellite photographs of the target area. A computerized guidance system on the bomb enables it to home in on the reflection of the beam from the target.

Equipped With TV Camera

Not all smart bombs are guided by laser beams. The GBU-15 carries a small television camera in its nose that sends pictures back to the airplane crew. If the bomb is off course, the crew can use electronic remote controls to guide it back on target.

Air Force and Navy officers contend that they can steer laser-guided bombs not just into the wall of a targeted building but through a specific window, even as their aircraft are maneuvering acrobatically to evade enemy fire.

“It’s not particularly difficult to do at all,” said Lt. Col. Gary Schwerdt, who has flown more than 2,500 hours in the F-111. “It actually becomes comfortable.”

But Col. Myers, conceding that “the human engineering factor becomes more and more important,” said he worries that “there comes a time when you may overwhelm the individual.”

And, beyond the danger of human fallibility, the technology remains far from perfect. Air Force officers acknowledge that the dust and debris of battle can scatter the laser beam, in effect distracting the bomb from its target. The laser can overheat and malfunction. Poor military intelligence can leave weapons officers with inaccurate targeting data.

Not Fail-Safe

“If a President is concerned about collateral damage, it’s hard to go to him and say, ‘It’s fail-safe--it will always hit what it is designed to hit,’ ” said Russell Murray, a former assistant defense secretary for program analysis and evaluation who is now a special counselor for the House Armed Services Committee.

Although Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger said shortly after the Libyan raid that it “would be virtually impossible” for bombs to have struck the French Embassy in Tripoli, the Defense Department eventually acknowledged that three American bombs “likely” fell on the embassy. In addition, two other bombs fell 700 yards off target, by a Pentagon account.

“There is a perception that if you have a bomb that is smart enough, you can carry out missions without getting in harm’s way,” said a Marine Corps aviation expert who asked not to be identified. “This is a fallacy. You’re going to have people getting killed. You’re not going to buy yourself a sanctuary with technology.”