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The Technology That Changed War
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The U.S. Air Force discovered that they could load up bombers and send them to loiter high above the battlefield, ready to provide precise, close, air support to allied troops at a few minute's notice. U.S. Special Forces were able to call in air strikes on enemy trenches a few hundred yards away from their own positions, again at little risk to U.S. pilots. This was the revolution in military affairs that had been predicted 15 years earlier.
In Iraq, a protracted air attrition campaign, like the 38-day bombardment of Saddam Hussein's forces in the 1991 Gulf war, was deemed politically impossible. Again JDAMs meant that the U.S. government and military had new options, and that a small, more mobile invasion force could strike quickly, closely supported by precision bombing attacks on the enemy units in front of it. In northern Iraq, an entire front collapsed in the face of a few hundred special operations troops calling in JDAM strikes on Iraqi positions.
The JDAM has also reinvigorated the U.S. air force's aging B-52 fleet. Since U.S. fighters dominate the air, the B-52 can safely loiter above enemy positions for hours, waiting for ground forces or surveillance assets such as JSTARS (The Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System) or unmanned GLOBAL HAWKS (a reconnaissance high-altitude, long-endurance unmanned aerial vehicle) to discover a JDAM target. The slowly circling contrails of the B-52s were one of the defining images of the Iraq and Afghan wars.
The JDAM also offers a good fit with the new Pentagon philosophy of "effect-based targeting," which is the military response to the instruction of politicians to -- for example -- allow a bombing raid to disable a factory without reducing the whole complex to rubble, or else kill an enemy politician or general sitting in a particular room in a particular building without destroying the entire building. In the past this would not have been possible, and targets would have to be hit many times to guarantee success, creating widespread collateral damage and bad publicity. Now it is more likely that a strike can be quick, and clean, requiring less rebuilding after the war.
The latest JDAMs further refine effects-based targeting. At Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, the military experimented in the summer of 2003 with new, smaller GPS-guided bombs that will allow a B-52 to carry over 100 individually targeted weapons of between 250 and 500 pounds. Each one of them will create far less collateral damage than the original 1000- and 2000-pound JDAMs.
As the war in Iraq demonstrated, America's enemies have already amended their own style of fighting as a result of seeing U.S. power in action. Andy Krepinevich, one of the first military theorists to discuss the Pentagon's "Revolution in Military affairs," says in our documentary, HI-TECH WAR, that "there is competition between the elements of precision warfare and the steps that others are taking to degrade the effectiveness of precision warfare -- by hiding, by creating a discrimination problem, for example intermingling with civilians … the first hundred or so schools that were searched in Iraq following the war, they all had weapons in them. The Iraqis had reasoned that the United States was not going to bomb a school and so, for them, that was an ideal place for weapons." And, as other military analysts have pointed out, Islamic extremists have developed a precision weapon of their own: the suicide bomb.
While a GPS-based weapons system is under development in Europe, and is expected to be ready in 2008, at present, the only GPS system in the world is controlled in that room under Colorado; it remains the foundation of modern American military power. For, as General Lance Lord of Air Force Space Command puts it, "If you're not in Space, you're not in the race."
And right now, no one else is.
Phil Craig is a military historian and the producer of the INNOVATION episode "Hi-Tech War." His books, FINEST HOUR (ASIN: 0684869306) and END OF THE BEGINNING (ISBN: 0340766808), can be found in bookstores and online.
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A JDAM bomb on the runway. |
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