For reasons ranging from U.S. skill to Saddam’s curious strategy, everything the coalition forces throw at Iraq is going gangbusters. Older aircraft such as the A-6 and F-111 apparently are delivering precision munitions with about the same effectiveness as brand-new models like the F-15E and F/A-18. The A-6, built in the early 1960s, cost a fraction of the F-15E’s $50 million price tag, even taking into account inflation and electronic upgrades A-6s have received.
Similarly, the $6 million A-10 antitank plane, long the subject of upper-echelon distaste because its performance is humdrum and its cost modest, has not only been successful attacking Iraqi tanks. A-10s have apparently flown strike missions behind the lines, a feat the Pentagon has been telling Congress only the most expensive aircraft could possibly accomplish.
Already tech buffs are rhapsodizing about how the $100-million F-117 stealth fighter can sneak up on targets around Baghdad without being shot down. “One of the lessons learned in the gulf has been the enormous value of stealth,” Defense Secretary Dick Cheney said last week. Cheney cites the performance of the F-117 in justifying continuation of the $850 million B-2 bomber. Others may use the example to support huge investments in the $90 million stealth Advanced Tactical Fighter for the Air Force, or revival of the $100 million A-12 Navy stealth attack plane.
A small inconvenience exists for the defense lobby: old, ungainly, radar-friendly aircraft like the A-6, A-7, A-10, F-111, F-14, F-15 and B-52 are prancing through Iraqi airspace without getting shot down, either.
Before Desert Storm, the Pentagon declared Iraq in possession of one of the best air-defense networks in the world. If even sophisticated defenses can be jammed and otherwise suppressed so thoroughly that aircraft with pulsing electronic “signatures” operate with seeming impunity, why spend many billions on radar evasion? There may be arguments for stealth technology; Desert Storm isn’t one of them.
Twenty years ago attacks on small objectives like Scud missile sites were unlikely to be precise enough to inflict definitive damage; now smart bombs can blast small targets. But the same kind of electronic advances that render the bombs more accurate have also given rise to the mobile missile. Twenty years ago large missiles were required for technical reasons to leap skyward from fixed launch pads that were easy to pinpoint. Now they can fly off the backs of trucks which can be maddeningly difficult to locate.
Twenty years ago the communication facilities recently destroyed in Iraq would also have taken months or years to rebuild. Today they can be replaced in hours with mobile microwave dishes rolled out of a warehouse.
In some cases - like backyard microwave dishes being attacked by $100 million stealth fighters - the technological counter is cheaper than the technological threat. This is one reason Saddam’s superior weapons did not roll over Iran in the Iran-Iraq War. It is also one reason the coalition has not rolled over Iraq, I whose military the United States out-spends by as much as 50 to 1.
Smart bombs are fiendishly lethal to anyone at the aim point. But they do not lay waste to huge areas. A recent Air Force video shows what appears to be six Scud transporters parked in a row; a laser bomb barrels toward the centermost of the group, obliterating it. Not mentioned: the launchers on the outside probably drove away, still working.
Though top-dollar hardware is raining on Iraq, Iraqis are probably not dying in such numbers that would shock survivors into surrender. This is good from a moral standpoint, yet means a foe may keep fighting long after seemingly irresistible force has been applied.
If the combined high-tech might of the Western powers has yet to make a nation as small and as poor as Iraq give in, how would these devices have performed against the adversary they were built to fight - the Soviet Union? Against the Eastern bloc, vast numbers of guns, guided missiles and fighters would have opposed deepstrike raids. Soviet electronic countermeasures would have confused targeting sensors and cross-jammed U.S. jammers. Many more U.S. planes and cruise missiles would have been shot down, while far fewer smart bombs would have been released under conditions conducive to bull’s-eye hits.
Now that an ideal-circumstances application of air power and electronic superiority has harmed but hardly routed little Iraq, perhaps the idea that gizmos can conquer all will finally be relegated to the Tom Clancy little boy’s fantasy world where it belongs. Let us have no delusions that advances in smart weapons can make any nation invincible - or that any degree of technology can alter the underlying ghastliness of war.
