Key U.S. Missile Probed After Somalia Deaths

American officials have quietly launched an intensive investigation of the TOW-2A missile, which has been considered one of the military’s most accurate weapons but which has been involved in a series of fatal misfires here that angered U.S. commanders on the ground and alienated many Somali civilians.

So great has been the Pentagon’s concern over the missile’s performance that U.S. Army experts from Alabama replaced the entire arsenal of TOW-2As in Mogadishu in late June, and the missile’s track record has improved dramatically in the past month.

But, in the weeks before a visiting team of sleuths from America examined every component in its launch systems here, errant TOW-2A missiles fired from U.S. Cobra gunships slammed into a French relief agency’s compound, killing a Somali aid worker and injuring seven others. They demolished an empty warehouse, where several more civilians were killed and injured. Some simply fell out of their tubes, hurtling to the ground with 6.8 pounds of high explosives.

At the end of five days of U.S.-led aerial and ground combat in Mogadishu in June--part of a U.N. assault to punish and cripple renegade warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid--the TOW-2A tally was so grim that it set off alarms in command centers of almost 50 armies worldwide, the loudest at the U.S. Army’s Missile Command in Huntsville, Ala.

The missiles’ poor performance in Mogadishu two months ago was the stuff of military planners’ nightmares: eight misses in 37 attempts for a weapon that is not supposed to miss more than 5% of the time in combat.

“What happened in June was enough to cause great concern and instant alarm,” said Dave Harris, Missile Command spokesman and a civilian expert on the TOW system.

The Army has reached no firm conclusions from its continuing investigation of the failures of the weapon, now best known by its acronym, which stands for “Tube-launched, Optically-tracked, Wire-guided” missile.

“We didn’t find a single smoking gun” that may have caused the missile misfires, Harris said in a telephone interview. But he said a team of experts dispatched here to try to resolve the TOW problems has focused on the severe weather conditions under which a batch of the missiles had been stored.

One gunner on a U.S. Cobra attack helicopter enforcing a U.N. “coercive disarmament” campaign here described the horrors of what happened because of the problems with the missile.

The gunner did not know that the BM-21 rocket launcher he had targeted in a crowded residential neighborhood here was actually rusted junk. No one had told him that U.S. Marines had examined it and left it for scrap months before.

No one had told the gunner--as he aligned the cross-hairs of his high-tech optical sight on an ancient weapon below--that the $12,000, 3 1/2-year-old missile he was about to fire into a neighborhood filled with women and children had been exposed to Saudi Arabia’s extreme heat for eight months.

Nor did he know that the weapon had been stowed for months more in the hold of a Navy ship that sailed the world and that the missile finally had been stored since last December in Mogadishu’s equatorial sun and torrential rain.

All he knew was that times were tense. It was June and U.N. troops were under fire from guerrillas of Mogadishu’s best-armed Somali clan. The Pentagon had told him the missile system he had at his fingertips was designated as “precision” weaponry--a 50-pound, TOW-2A wire-guided missile that the U.S. Army and its manufacturer, Hughes Aircraft, had designed to destroy the most sophisticated battle tank with a minimum 95% accuracy.

That day, it didn’t. The missile went wide, exploding into a tea stall, killing an old Somali woman and a child, spreading panic and fear throughout this capital. The gunner fired again; his second missile destroyed the useless rocket launcher he had targeted.

“It was one thing when we were firing TOWs at a row of Iraqi tanks in the desert,” said an American Cobra pilot in Mogadishu. The veteran of Operation Desert Storm against Iraq in 1991 said he was hurt and frustrated when his gunner’s missiles went astray and killed innocent Somalis. “Back in the Gulf War, if you missed one tank, you hit another. Here, if you miss even by a few feet, you kill people.”

The urgent investigation of the TOW-2A by the Pentagon and Missile Command has been under way for two months and has been nothing short of a detective story, with the lives of civilians and soldiers worldwide and the fate of America’s best-selling, most widely used high-tech weapons system at stake.

Harris said a visiting six-member American group of missile experts made changes in Mogadishu that improved the TOW’s performance to far more acceptable levels. Visiting experts from Alabama, Texas and Tucson, Ariz., (where Hughes has a missile plant) spent 10 days, using the latest tests and diagnostic equipment.

They replaced the TOW arsenal in Mogadishu with 380 newer missiles from Alabama, which have performed far more accurately in two subsequent U.N. combat operations on June 30 and July 12.

Of 51 combat TOW-2A missile launches from Cobras in Somalia since the missile team left June 28, just three have missed targets--one inflicting civilian injuries--in a performance ratio that Harris called “at least as good as we would anticipate anywhere in the world.”

“Things appear to be fixed in Somalia,” Harris said. He added that he well understands that such conclusions are of little comfort to Somali civilians and to combat officers in Mogadishu, among them U.S. Army officers in the unprecedented U.N. peacekeeping operation that includes troops from 28 nations.

For these officers, the continuing battle for Mogadishu’s streets against Aidid’s ragtag militia has become a war for the hearts and minds of the Somalis, in which a single civilian casualty exacts an enormous price in propaganda.

“I’m not impressed if we fire 1,000 missiles and only one fails. If it kills a woman or a child, we lose the battle that day,” said one senior officer in the U.N. force. “Every time we fire a missile into this city, it escalates the tension on the streets, and that makes our job of bringing the peace a little tougher.”

Other military commanders privately questioned the use of the TOW-2A here. The weapon was not designed to surgically target houses and even individual rooms, as it has been used against Aidid’s arsenals, command centers and suspected Mogadishu hide-outs; the TOW-2A is meant to destroy enemy tanks in an open battlefield.

But even the officers and commanders who were most critical conceded that there is no other weapon available in America’s high-tech arsenal that better fits the mission here than the TOW-2A--if it functions properly.

They also noted that the missile’s failure rates have declined drastically since American experts replaced the Mogadishu arsenal and checked and adjusted every component in firing systems on every Cobra copter in the U.N. mission.

The TOW problems raised alarms far beyond Somalia, as statistics at Missile Command indicate that the missiles are, by far, the most widely used high-tech American weapon in the world. Hughes has manufactured more than 600,000 of them in five variants. They have been sold and exported to 50 nations since the first generation TOW was fielded in 1970.

“Certainly, you’ve got American soldiers getting shot at over there in Somalia, and that’s a great concern, but the other thing is you’ve got a lot of people all over the world betting . . . on TOWs,” Harris of the Missile Command said. “That’s why we jumped on this thing immediately in June and why it remains such a high priority.”

At the heart of the missile probe are 46 TOW-2As that investigators brought back with them from Somalia--the last remains of the Mogadishu arsenal that Cobra gunners had been firing into the city last June. “We’re wringing those missiles out very, very thoroughly and very, very carefully, literally tearing each missile apart to see if we can’t figure out what went wrong,” Harris said.

Investigators have ruled out performance problems by pilots, gunners or maintenance crews, Harris said. When asked about reports received by The Times from weapons experts in Mogadishu that every missile that misfired in June had been from the batch of TOW-2As that had been exposed for long periods to extreme weather in Saudi Arabia, Somalia and on the open seas, Harris observed, “That’s exactly what we’re looking at right now.”

In tracing the history of the 46 suspect Somali TOW-2As, the missile sleuths learned that all of them--as well as the errant missiles fired in June--had come from one “manufacturing lot” at the Hughes missile factory in Arizona.

They came off the production line in Tucson in October, 1989, and were shipped to Saudi Arabia less than a year later. Many TOW-2As were fired by the U.S.-led coalition that drove Iraq out of Kuwait in 1991. The missiles that ended up on the Cobras in Mogadishu last June were among the unused American arsenal, reassigned after the Gulf War to Marine units on Navy ships that cruised the seas until they deployed in Mogadishu last December.

Even if investigators ultimately blame the TOW’s troubles in Mogadishu on climate and storage problems, it will come as little consolation to the 2 million civilians in the Somali capital who have experienced daily terror. Besieged by bandits and clan wars for almost three years and now engulfed in Aidid’s brutal, escalating war with the United Nations, the women and children here say they have paid the highest price for the missile misfires.

“Really, we are fed up. We never know when the shooting will start. And when the missile comes, it has no name on it,” said Amina Haji Abdullahi, a prominent Somali and co-founder of Iida, a national women’s group.

“Every time we see a helicopter now, we hide. Now, everyone lives in fear. The other day, my 7-year-old daughter asked me, ‘Mommy, is there anywhere in the world where there are no bombs and bullets and missiles? Does everyone in the world live under helicopters?’

“Just stop this war, please,” she implored. “Both sides. We need a normal life free from the missiles and these machines in the sky. We need to go to sleep at night, knowing we will be alive in the morning.”

* DELTA FORCE ARRIVES: Elite unit reported in Somalia to hunt down Aidid. A10

TOW-24 Antitank Missile

* RANGE: Minimum, 213 feet; maximum, 12,303 feet * LENGTH: 3 feet, 11 inches * WIDTH: 8.8 inches

Source: “Jane’s Infantry Weapons, 1990-1991”