“PRECISION” GUIDED MISSILES? HOW’S THAT?

“PRECISION” GUIDED MISSILES? HOW’S THAT? Every time there’s a war, the Pentagon assures that, “our missiles have gotten a LOT smarter since the last time.” And so now, once again, we’re promised that they’re using the smartest missiles ever.
You’d think, wouldn’t you, that if a missile is so darned “smart” then it should be able to arrive at, say, a military headquarters without harming a nearby market-place?
But how about this: this time round, the Pentagon has guided missiles that are so unbelievably dumb that they not only miss the intended target building– they also miss the intended target country altogether!!
And this has happened not just once but, according to high-level Pentagon briefer Maj. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, as quoted in an article in today’s Washington Post, “about seven times.”
I’m not quite sure what “about” seven radical mis-aims means in this context. But that was the number of times, according to McChrystal, that US Tomahawks and other supposedly “smart” missiles have slammed into countries other than Iraq. At least once into each of Iran, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. Turkey and Saudi Arabia were both so pissed off by the phenomenon that they rapidly forbade the US from even flying their Tomahawks over their national terrains.
This question of much-dumber-than-promised munitions needs to be taken carefully into consideration when we listen to claims from Pentagon spokespeople about the US conducting this war “in a more surgical way than ever before”, or claims that “the military is actually even exposing its own people to significant risks in order to minimize civilian casualties.”
We need to start with a clear understanding of the lethality of some of these munitions. The “Little Boy” atomic bomb dropped over Hiroshima in 1945 had an explosive force equivalent to 10-12 kilotons of TNT. The biggest (and also, reputedly “smart”) bombs that the US military is dropping over Iraq these days have an explosive force of 2 kilotons. So six of them would provide the explosive force of one Hiroshima.
In Hiroshima, of course, many of the subsequent fatalities came from the after-effects of the radiation released by the bomb. But nearly all of the physical damage caused by the bomb– the destruction, by fire, of the entire downtown area, and the incineration of the people living there– came from the sheer force of the blast and the many fires it sparked throughout the city.
In Hiroshima, too, the damage was multiplied by the US Air Force’s fiendish decision to set the detonation of the bomb to occur NOT when it reached the ground, but some 600 meters up in the air. That distributed the effects of the blast much more broadly. In the case of the US’s present arsenal, “air burst” of some bombs including the infamous MOAB has come back into vogue again.
So we are talking about some extremely unpleasant and lethal munitions in the US arsenal. Not the kind of “tool” that you would want to give anyone to use irresponsibly.
What does “responsible” mean in this context, I wonder?
It’s a known “fact” of statistics that if a system has a failure rate of X percent, then you can reasonably predict that if you use the system Y x 100 times, you could expect X x Y of those operations to result in failure. So if you know that the guidance system on your “smart” munition is going to fail X percent of the time, then the more missiles you fire, the greater the number of mis-aims.
Gosh, this is SO elementary.
But then, it’s also a known fact of running any kind of complex system, that the more complex its operations become, the greater the chance of human or other error. So as your “Y” value above becomes greater within the same period of time, it ends up multiplying your failure rate by more than a factor of Y.
You get my drift.
These guys have fired thousands of PGMs into Iraq these past ten days. According to that same W. Post article, McChrystal said that just counting the Tomahawk sea-launched cruise missiles alone, 675 have already been fired. (I think each one costs around $2 million, by the way. So that’s $1.35 billion of “our” tax money going whoosh, right there.)
And that’s not mention the heavy stuff being dropped by the B-52s, and the JDAMS, and everything else. Very complex operations indeed.
So it was entirely foreseeable that, in these circumstances, a non-trivial number of these very lethal munitions would end up mis-aiming.
In the W. Post article, reporter Jonathan Wesiman wrote:
“McChrystal told reporters there is no indication of a serious technical problem with the sea-launched cruise missiles. More than 675 have been launched since the beginning of the war, he said. The failure rate at this point is about 1 percent, and in most instances, the errant missiles did not explode. The warhead on a Tomahawk is not supposed to activate until it nears its target. One Pentagon official said that with a weapon system as sophisticated as a precision-guided cruise missile, a failure rate of 5 percent would be considered ‘very good.'”
I think these statements from McChrystal and the nameless Pentagon official need unpacking a little. McC accurately did the math to get figure of 1 percent. (That’s the figure for the number of Tomahawks that fell on the wrong country, remember– not just the wrong house, or the wrong city-block.) And we learn that, “in most instances” the mis-aimed missiles did not explode. He notably did not say, “in all instances.” That’s pretty scary.
And then, this un-named guy (okay, I’m just hazarding a wild guess here as to the gender of Wesiman’s Pentagon official) says that for something like the Tomahawk, even a failure rate of “5 percent” would be considered very good.
How’s that again? If you’ve launched 675 missiles as massively lethal as the Tomahawks, and as “few” of them as 5 percent, that is, 33.75 Tomahawks (or let’s say “about” 38 of them) end up going to the wrong place— the wrong country, say, or the wrong city-block, or even just the wrong building– then that is not just “acceptable”, not just “good”, but “very good”??
These people are– I’ve said it before– very dangerous, and criminally insane.
It’s not just that they treat the rest of us like idiots when they assume we can’t do the math on the consequences of very heavy, very complex bombardments with massive munitions. It’s that they don’t seem even to be able to imagine that the kinds of figure for “failure rates” that they talk about so glibly have actual and devastating consequences on the lives of actual human beings.
So let’s bring this madness to an end. Please. Let’s end the bombing right now. And let’s bring our soldiers home before they do any more damage to the world and to their own, already badly damaged psyches.
Addendum: Bob Fisk had a story in today’s Independent, datelined from the Shu’ale portion of Baghdad, in which he reported on the “at least 62” civilians who were killed by an errant missile there Friday. He reported on a key shard of metal he saw there:
The missile was guided by computers and that vital shard of fuselage was computer-coded. It can be easily verified and checked by the Americans ? if they choose to do so. It reads: 30003-704ASB 7492. The letter “B” is scratched and could be an “H”. This is believed to be the serial number. It is followed by a further code which arms manufacturers usually refer to as the weapon’s “Lot” number. It reads: MFR 96214 09.
The piece of metal bearing the codings was retrieved only minutes after the missile exploded on Friday evening, by an old man whose home is only 100 yards from the 6ft crater. Even the Iraqi authorities do not know that it exists. The missile sprayed hunks of metal through the crowds ? mainly women and children ? and through the cheap brick walls of local homes, amputating limbs and heads. Three brothers, the eldest 21 and the youngest 12, for example, were cut down inside the living room of their brick hut on the main road opposite the market. Two doors away, two sisters were killed in an identical manner. “We have never seen anything like these wounds before,” Dr Ahmed, an anaesthetist at the Al-Noor hospital told me later. “These people have been punctured by dozens of bits of metal.”
Can someone who reads this help to track down that “manufacturer”, or any other details about the missile? (I’m thinking “ASB” may be air-to-surface ballistic?)