ATTACK on AMERICA

Military

ATTACK
on AMERICA

'Smart' weapon popular

U.S. commanders embrace system despite errors

12/06/2001

By RICHARD WHITTLE / The Dallas Morning News

WASHINGTON – The bomb that killed three U.S. soldiers and hurt 20 in Afghanistan used a satellite guidance system that has become a weapon of choice for American commanders since it was introduced two years ago.

U.S. forces are far from having their confidence in the Joint Direct Attack Munition shaken by accidents such as Wednesday's or a Nov. 26 error that wounded five Americans. They are relying so heavily on such "smart bombs" that the Air Force is accelerating its orders for them.

"I don't think one or two incidents out of all the JDAMs we've dropped necessarily means that there's a problem with the weapon," said a senior defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The Air Force, which serves as the Pentagon's purchasing agent for JDAMs, not only wants to speed up delivery of JDAMs on order but is also budgeting $130 million to expand production capacity, U.S. and defense industry officials said.

"We're doing OK right now, but I am taking steps to increase the production rate, and we are looking at another increment to increase the production rate even more, so that we avoid any shortages," Gen. John Jumper, the Air Force chief of staff, said last week.The JDAM has revolutionized the way U.S. forces conduct air warfare. The weapon makes it possible to take out enemy air defenses, bridges and other targets – even when obscured by clouds – that, in previous conflicts, required repeated attacks at great risk to pilots.

"In the olden days, it took an awful lot of airplanes and a lot of bombs to accomplish your purpose, and that put a lot of people at risk," said a Senate aide who spoke on condition of anonymity.

"The thing that really drove precision munitions in the first place were those pesky bridges and dams in Vietnam," the Senate aide said. "We kept sending guys back to bomb them with little success and kept putting guys in the Hanoi Hilton [prison] as a result."

A Boeing product

Made in St. Charles, Mo., by Boeing Co., the JDAM – pronounced "JAY-dam" – isn't a bomb. It's an $18,000 kit including tail fins, guidance devices, and a small computer that is strapped onto a "dumb bomb," converting it into a "smart bomb," said Boeing spokesman Bob Algarotti.

"Dumb bombs," or "gravity bombs," lack any guidance system. "Smart bombs" use kits such as the JDAM to guide them to targets.

Some follow laser beams. The JDAM aims at geographic coordinates, using guidance from global positioning system satellites.

The JDAM can be strapped onto 2,000-pound and 1,000-pound bombs, Mr. Algarotti said. Boeing is testing a JDAM kit for 500-pound bombs.

The target's geographic coordinates and the bomb's location are entered into the JDAM computer by the aircraft's pilot or another crew member before the bomb is released.

The kit measures the bomb's movement, and its computer adjusts the tail fins to guide the weapon to its target, Mr. Algarotti explained.

The JDAM was new when the U.S.-led NATO air campaign against Serb forces in Kosovo began in 1999, and the only aircraft equipped to use the system was the B-2 bomber. About 670 JDAMs were used in the 78-day Kosovo campaign, and "we ran short," Gen. Jumper said.

The improvement in accuracy was so revolutionary that the Pentagon ramped up its orders for JDAMs dramatically after Kosovo.The services also went to work outfitting other aircraft to drop JDAMs. A 1950s-vintage B-52 bomber dropped the JDAM that killed the U.S. troops and five Afghan opposition fighters in Afghanistan on Wednesday.

Navy and Marine Corps F/A-18s flying from aircraft carriers and Air Force B-1B bombers are among the planes that have been dropping JDAMs in Afghanistan.

Borrowing from Navy

No figures on how many bombs have been dropped on Afghanistan and how many of those have been JDAMs were available Wednesday, a U.S. Central Command spokesman said.

Whatever the number, the Navy, whose past orders were far smaller than the Air Force's, has had to borrow JDAM kits from the Air Force since the Afghanistan campaign began Oct. 7 – part of the reason Gen. Jumper has ordered more.

The fear of a JDAM shortage is being driven in part by the fact that U.S. commanders are relying on the weapon more than their war fighting doctrine envisioned they would, the Senate aide said.

The general philosophy, the aide said, has been that precision munitions should be used sparingly, mainly to take out enemy air defenses and other fixed targets at the start of a conflict, after which other targets would be attacked with less expensive "dumb bombs."

Before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the aide said, "The feeling was, precision munitions are expensive, and we're just buying too many of them, and that takes money away from other important things."

The demand for JDAMs in Afghanistan will probably increase as winter unfolds and the number of cloudy days rises, and if caves and tunnels where Osama bin Laden may be hiding become the majority of U.S. targets, said a senior Pentagon official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The impetus to ramp up production, however, is not the campaign in Afghanistan but the prospect of further military conflicts in the war on terrorism.

"We still have to worry about other possible adversaries," the official said. "We get into some full-scale conflict with North Korea or Iraq or some other second-tier military power, we'll chew up ordnance like nobody's business."