High-Tech Weaponry Shows Its Teeth in Test of Battle

A U.S. Patriot missile destroys an Iraqi rocket roaring toward American troops in Saudi Arabia. Tomahawk cruise missiles pass their first battle test with flying colors. Stealth fighters streak in and out of Iraq “before the antiaircraft even comes on.”

The sands and skies of the Middle East are serving as a live laboratory for some of America’s newest high-tech weapons of war.

“There has never been a case in a wartime situation in which such ingenuity and performance have come together,” Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) said today after a briefing from senior Pentagon officials on results of the U.S. air campaign.

The full picture of how the most sophisticated U.S. weapons--developed over the last two decades at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars--have fared is not yet clear. But military leaders say U.S. technology has been a decisive edge in battle.

“It has been, in some respects, a technology war,” Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of all American forces in the Persian Gulf area, said from his headquarters in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

The power of high-tech weaponry made its mark from the opening minutes of the war. Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from Navy warships in the gulf and the Red Sea helped kick off the aerial assault by flying undetected into Iraq to hit key targets such as storage sites for Iraqi surface-to-air ballistic missiles.

The high-tech weaponry being unleashed on Iraq is sprinkled throughout the American arsenal, including:

Air Force F-117A stealth fighter-bombers. These planes, which can deliver 2,000-pound bombs, are built with special composite materials that the Air Force claims make the aircraft impossible to detect by enemy radar.

Night-vision goggles. These devices, worn either by helicopter pilots or ground troops, turn night into day by amplifying the light from the stars or the moon.

Airborne radar. The Air Force’s Airborne Warning and Control System planes deployed in Saudi Arabia are seeing their first combat service. These modified Boeing 747s use advanced radar and air-to-ground communications to detect enemy aircraft hundreds of miles away.

Aegis antiaircraft systems. This Navy system is a network of radars and computers on board cruisers that can direct the ship’s air-defense missiles at 20 enemy aircraft at the same time at a range of 70 miles.