‘This Is Not a Business of Perfection’

For politicians and war planners, “smart” weapons have replaced the broadsword with a rapier. But after at least one laser-guided bomb went awry in Kosovo, killing ethnic Albanian refugees, Western leaders were quick to point out that in wartime, even a rapier has its limits.

By making pinpoint accuracy possible for allied warplanes, “precision-guided” munitions have made bombing more like surgery than slaughter. In the process, they have made war safer for pilots, who now need to make a single pass at targets where they once needed to make dozens.

But experts say those improvements have changed civilian society as well: “PGMs” have brought the grisly business of war into the nation’s living rooms in neatly packaged video clips. And along the way, they have profoundly altered the public’s expectations of military actions and their consequences.

“What’s possible becomes necessary,” said Eliot Cohen of Johns Hopkins University, who directed the Air Force’s study of air power’s role in the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

In an era in which technology has made it possible to minimize civilian casualties, politicians, the public and even military planners appear to have elevated a theoretical ideal to a paramount objective.

Cohen said the trade-offs are already becoming clear. NATO war planners acknowledge that they have taken important Serbian targets off their bombing lists for fear of civilian casualties.

President Clinton, speaking to newspaper editors in San Francisco on Thursday, reminded his influential listeners that for all its technological wizardry, war is still hell.

“You cannot have this kind of conflict without some errors like this occurring,” Clinton said. “This is not a business of perfection.”

While Americans have been dazzled by the extraordinary possibilities of precision-guided munitions, analysts say the virtues of these weapons are regularly oversold, often by generals and defense leaders intent on building budgets and bolstering their prestige.

First introduced into the U.S. arsenal at the end of the Vietnam War, precision-guided weapons came into their own during the Iraqi air war early this decade. In the wake of the Gulf War, virtually the entire U.S. arsenal has been converted to take advantage of advances in guidance technology and electronics that have made weapons more accurate.

But while the Pentagon advertises “accuracy rates” as a few feet to the right or left of their targets, war planners acknowledge that 50% of the weapons fall outside that circle--many by a few city blocks.

And as the air war over Kosovo has shown, they are hardly infallible. Guided by radio waves, laser beams and, in increasing numbers, satellite messages, the current generation of PGMs can be foiled by clouds, smoke and electronic interference. And, not least of all, these darlings of modern weaponry can be sent awry by human error, as the misjudgment of an American F-16 pilot illustrated in the air over the Kosovo village of Meja on Wednesday.

“Compared to all previous warfare as we’ve known it, in terms of indiscriminate harm to civilians, this is still remarkably good,” Cohen of Johns Hopkins University said Thursday. “But people don’t really think in terms of historical context.”

In World War II, U.S. bombers routinely flattened whole cities in a bid to knock out military factories and disrupt transportation networks. In Dresden, Germany, “dumb” bombs dropped from allied warplanes killed as many as 35,000 civilians in two days.

Much had changed by the Gulf War, which introduced the American public to the new weapons. Using precision-guided munitions, allied jets were able to turn out the lights in Baghdad without causing extensive casualties, and to collapse bridges by sweeping their legs out from under them.

In the current Yugoslav campaign, they’ve let NATO warplanes flatten the half of a Serbian automobile factory engaged in weapons production and leave the other half standing.

Such precision, say analysts, may also have had the effect of emboldening timid political leaders to military action. Among NATO’s 19 member nations, the promise of a clean war with minimal civilian casualties clearly helped prop up the faint of heart, said Barry Posen, who teaches national security policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

But in the end, Posen said, precision targeting cannot replace clear thinking about a military operation’s objectives. And it cannot change the fact that only ground troops, not bombs, can hold territory and protect civilian populations from brutality. In Kosovo, that may be one of the most significant limits of their effectiveness.

“Our political objectives were not precise in this war, and the discriminant capabilities of these weapons are no substitute for the classical requirement in a war to have a reasonably clear set of objectives,” Posen said. “Discriminant weapons are not a substitute for good strategy.”