COLUMN ONE : High-Tech War Hopes Overdrawn : Policy-makers have celebrated advanced weaponry to win public support. Now they worry people may expect too much from technology. Its limits are profound.

How many tanks do the Iraqis have left? What planes have flown from Iraq into Iran? What is the condition of Saddam Hussein’s troops in trenches in Kuwait?

Such questions come with regularity in Pentagon press briefings, congressional briefings, even barroom bets. And often, the queries open with the sort of premise posed by a reporter to Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams at a recent briefing: “With the satellite photographs that can read license plates, don’t we have some indication. . . ?”

No society on Earth has had a greater, longer love affair with technology than America. “Technological utopianism”--the belief that any problem can be solved if only the right technology can be found and applied--has been a quintessential American belief for years, says Stanford University social historian Joseph Corn.

But now, for government policy-makers in the Gulf War, the gap between the reality of technological limits and the public perception of the power of technology has become an object of both manipulation and anxiety.

On one hand, U.S. officials have tried to use the new technology to mold public opinion. Almost every day, freshly recorded military videotapes--never before released in the midst of an armed conflict--show bombs plunging into air shafts, swooping through doors and destroying bridges, all to drive home one overriding message: “This is not another Vietnam. This time American weapons work. American power will prevail.”

At the same time, the same officials, from President Bush on down, openly worry that public misconceptions about the power of technology will lead Americans to expect too much--and ultimately could turn the country against the war at the slightest setback.

“Perhaps in the euphoria of the high-technology weapons and this sort of thing, we have lost sight of the fact that lives are being lost,” the U.S. commander in the Gulf, Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, mused during a recent Cable News Network interview.

“Somebody asked me about (whether) this is more like a computer game,” Schwarzkopf added. “And I said, ‘Not to me it’s not. . . . There are human lives involved here, and war is going to kill people.’ ”

Indeed, for all the dramatic capability of modern weapons technology, its limits are profound.

High-technology bombs may crater a runway, but plain, low-technology shovels and asphalt can fill the holes back up.

Satellites can be built to shoot detailed pictures from hundreds of miles up in the sky, but they cannot always see through clouds.

And electronic surveillance can capture even the transmissions from the walkie-talkie of an Iraqi field commander, but with just a handful of Arabic-speaking intelligence analysts in government employ, only a tiny fraction of the intercepted signals can ever be read.

“There’s a tendency to believe that because we know what we do know from intelligence that we must know everything,” Pentagon spokesman Williams said. “Of course,” he added, “we don’t.”

The public’s inability to appreciate the limits of technology already has been apparent in the first weeks of the war. Before the fighting actually broke out, many commentators and members of Congress were predicting that the conflict would end within days. Polls indicated that a large segment of the public supported the Administration’s policies but that many Americans were likely to change their minds if the issue of high casualties was brought up.

Such potential volatility in American public opinion--the prospect of sharp swings of mood between euphoria and anxiety--have become a serious concern in the White House and among military leaders.

Meanwhile, overseas, the reputation of American technological power has had some disadvantages. Rumor-mongers in Europe and the Middle East have convinced at least some people of elaborate conspiracy theories based on the premise that the United States actually wanted Iraq to invade Kuwait. The rationale: America’s extensive technology must have given the U.S. advance warning about the Aug. 2 invasion. If Washington had opposed the attack, it could--and would--have stopped it.

As the persistence of those theories shows, belief in the omnipotence of technology is not a uniquely American trait. But it is deeply ingrained in American society.

The “utopianism” to which Corn referred draws on a love affair with technology that has existed in American society for more than a century, says Corn’s Stanford colleague, historian Barton Bernstein.

Although some Americans have been victims of technological change over the years, the majority have seen technology change their lives for the better--making their leisure activities more fun, their cars more comfortable, their jobs more productive. “There’s a genuine reservoir of sentiment that trusts technology, and people in authority have the power to tap into that reservoir and employ it,” Bernstein says.

Military and security officials understand that dynamic and often have exaggerated the ability of their machines in their quest for money to build them. “The best possibilities are emphasized and the shortfalls are not,” says Bobby Inman, a retired admiral and former head of the National Security Agency, which runs the nation’s electronic surveillance efforts.

At the same time, people who believe in the omnipotence of their own side’s machines can easily develop exaggerated fears about the other side’s contraptions.

With much military technology, “we operate in a void, pretty much an empirical vacuum,” says Bruce Blair, a nuclear weapons expert at Washington’s Brookings Institution. “We’re working in that area in the domain of myth, theology and conjecture,” Blair says. In that sort of atmosphere, he muses, one can easily “have nightmare images that are worse than reality.”

During World War II, for example, the ability of the German V-2 rocket to hit London shocked public opinion in the allied nations, at least initially--in part because Hitler had boasted of possessing “secret” weapons.

Similarly, in the current war, Iraq’s Scud missiles and its threats of chemical warfare have riveted public attention--even though military officials say the vast bulk of casualties in the war will result from such relatively low-tech weapons as rifles, hand grenades and bayonets.

“People like to believe in magic,” says Peter Likins, president of Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and a member of several high-level government advisory panels on science policy. “When they see something that seems miraculous, they tend to say, ‘Wow--magic. I guess they can do anything these days.’ Of course, they can’t.”

Take surveillance satellites, for example: If you wanted to have the ability to stare at a country such as Iraq for 24 hours a day, looking at everything, the technology to do so exists--at least in theory, Inman says.

In practice, however, that effort would cost hundreds of billions of dollars. Because of that, the network of satellites that the United States uses to spy on Iraq has limits.

Since the beginning of the Gulf crisis, U.S. commanders have been able to spy on Iraq with a series of satellites that keep tabs on Hussein’s legions from orbits several hundred miles above the Earth. Five to seven of the satellites carry cameras. One is equipped with radar that enables it to see through at least some cloud cover.

From there, the satellite cameras can “see license plates, although they cannot read them,” says John Pike, a space-science expert with the Federation of American Scientists.

“But,” he adds, “it’s like looking at the world through a soda-straw.” As with any camera, the more powerful the magnification on a satellite, the smaller the area that is covered.

Every few hours, the satellite flies by, and for a few minutes--if clouds do not obscure its view--its cameras take pictures of a thin strip of the battlefield. The satellite can see Iraqi Scud missile-launchers, for example, but only if they happen to be visible while the satellite is within range.

Depending on how many satellites are in use, analysts over a period of hours or days can lay one strip after another side by side in a vast mosaic that eventually produces a photographic picture of the entire war zone.

Pike estimates that full coverage of Kuwait requires 1,000 to 1,500 pictures. Unfortunately, like people painting the Golden Gate Bridge, the effort takes so much time that “by the time you do it, you have to start all over,” he says.

There are other eyes in the sky permanently positioned above Iraq that can monitor the country full time from so-called geosynchronous orbits--those in which the satellite’s speed exactly matches the Earth’s rotation.

To achieve that matching of speeds, however, the laws of physics require the satellite to be 22,300 miles up. From there, the satellite can see and warn about the fiery flash of missile launches, but not the cold gray of missile launchers.

Similar constraints limit the ability of so-called signals intelligence--or electronic eavesdropping.

Using a vast array of sensors, radars and listening posts, U.S. intelligence agencies track Iraqi communications. But, Pike notes, very little of what is collected is ever actually deciphered or even listened to.

In theory, for example, the machines are capable of listening in on the cockpit chatter between Iraqi pilots and ground controllers in Iran.

In practice, however, the time that would be necessary to sort through the millions of signals collected every day, find those specific conversations and transcribe them is prohibitive, intelligence experts say.

If signals analysts can detect the specific “signature”--a distinctive pattern that permits identification of a high-priority target for eavesdropping--they will try to transcribe those signals. Conversations from Hussein’s command bunker are an example of a signature eagerly being sought.

But for most other signals, what is done instead is what analysts call a “traffic analysis”--a running study of which locations are in contact with one another and how much communication is going on.

The limitations that affect surveillance also restrict the power of weapons.

“A Tomahawk missile can fly accurately to some place that is pre-selected and deliver a 1,000-pound bomb,” a government weapons expert notes.

“But if that place is a hardened command bunker, all that 1,000-pound bomb is going to do is rattle the shrubbery outside,” he said. By the same token, “if the weapon blows the building up, but it turns out there was nothing inside, you have accuracy, but you haven’t accomplished much.”

What these examples have in common is an often overlooked fact: For better or worse, the technological component of anything “is only part of the solution,” says Anthony G. Oettinger, a specialist in military command and control systems who directs Harvard University’s Program on Information Resources Policy.

The belief that technology can be a panacea is “a dynamic that is timeless,” Oettinger says. “But Murphy’s Law is also timeless.”