I remember watching the documentary “Why We Fight” recently (when it was free on Google video) and I’ve been rolling over something in my head. There was one scene in the film where they showed an Iraqi man going through the rubble that was once his house, looking for the remains of (his entire?) family that had been killed when a missile missed its target (Saddam’s palace next door, I think).
Then there was a flash of a shocking claim/fact that I can’t remember exactly, but the gist of it is that none or very few of the missiles that are guided from far away by lasers or satellites (I don’t know which) have not hit their targets.
Does anyone have any information on this? If that’s the case, I don’t understand why this isn’t/hasn’t been bigger news. Has anyone seen the documentary recently who can more accurately quote the factoid?
I haven’t seen the documentary, but the bomb is aiming at a lasered target. If the plane carrying the targetting laser can’t maintain the target (having to dodge AA fire or an AA missile, for instance), then the bomb may well not hit the desired target because the designated target is now something else.
Wait, is the claim that laser guided missiles always miss, or that they always hit? If the claim is that they (almost) always miss, then the shocking secret is that there is no such thing as precision bombing, it’s all a lie. That would be pretty shocking.
If the claim is that they always hit, then what is the shocking secret? That Dick Cheney ordered the military to bomb this anonymous civilian’s house on purpose? Why would he do that? A grudge?
There’s a difference between SAMs failing when hastily pressed into an anti-missile role, and guided missiles regularly failing to hit ground targets.
We know we can hit ground targets from airplanes pretty accurately. Perhaps the Pentagon likes to exagerate the accuracy of precision guided bombs, but our current bombs are much more accurate than they used to be. Yeah, in Gulf War I there was a lot of press about precision bombs, but most of the bombs dropped were old-fashioned iron bombs.
I still can’t figure out whether the OP is complaining that laser-guided bombs never work, or is complaining that they always work, so why did this guy’s house get bombed?
On the chance that the complaint is the second one, anyone who says that precision bombs always work is smoking crack. Of course bombs miss, for all kinds of reasons. The most obvious is that the guy with the laser pointer is pointing it at the wrong thing. Target a house next to Saddam’s palace, thinking the house is part of the palace, and the house gets blowed up instead of part of the palace. Or the missile is fired, but the guy with the laser pointer ends up dead/distracted while the missile is in flight…the guided missile suddenly becomes an unguided missile. Or the missile gets hit by a golden BB…not enough to destroy it, just enough that the 99.99% accurate guidance goes down to 50%. Or the munitions worker who was in charge of QA for this batch of missiles had an argument with his wife the day the batch went out the factory and he just stamped “approved” on everything like a robot. Or on and on.
I don’t see what is supposed to be sinister about a precision guided missile hitting a civilian house located near one of Saddam’s palaces. Is it sinister because it proves that Dick Cheney wanted to maximize civilian causalties? Look, we could have firebombed Baghdad and pulled a Dresden if we wanted civilian casualties. What is sinister about a missile that misses its target? That the house was targeted on purpose? But what possible purpose could that be?
A substantial number of bombs and missiles do not hit their targets. If you get 90% hits, you are doing well. Even if a laser designator is kept perfectly on the target, the guidance and steering assembly on the bomb can fail, or the course corrections needed to hit the target can exceed the steering capability of the bomb. The pilot is responsible for dropping or lofting the bomb into a “basket” that will allow the bomb to acquire its target and make course corrections. With sophisticated and complex weapons like guided missiles, a substantial number will fail after launch. Perfection is unobtainable and very expensive to approach, so they set performance requirements that specify an allowable failure rate and how close the warhead has to approach the target at impact to be considered a success.
Any bomb is going to have a circular error probable (CEP) measuring its inaccuracy. The Joint Directed Attack Munition (JDAM) is the GPS-guided bomb; the operator gives the weapon Lat/Long coordinates and it steers to that aimpoint. Open sources claim a CEP of 3 meters for the JDAM. Laser-guided bombs are more accurate (CEP of 1-2 meters) as long as the laser is on the target. In either case, if the guidance package fails, the bomb falls ballistically and probably will not hit its target – presumably the guidance package’s failure rate is built into the CEP.
If the laser is off the target, or if the GPS signal is jammed near the target, the CEP goes up and accuracy drops. Any country using GPS jammers to degrade accuracy of bombs in an urban environment is deliberately endangering their civilians. I can’t get you actual hit/miss rates (they’re probably classified) but it’s my understanding that they’re pretty good.
There is significant difference between laser guided and satalite guided munitions. The first gulf war relied on laser guided munitions which, while still a big technological advancment, were on the whole over hyped (the most effective weapon of the first gulf war was the B52 dropping old fashioned “dumb” bombs). Satalite weapons are significantly more reliable, and less suceptible to environmental factors, and probaly do live up to the “smart bomb” hype.
That said they are not 100% reliable. And when you unleash a modern war machine on a country really hideous, unspeakable, things are going to happen to lots of innocent civilians, however hi-tech your weapons are. This is why war should the last resort of a civilised country not the first (and why “Waging Aggressive War” was one of the crimes the Nazis were charged with at Nerumberg).
So the shocking secret is that the public believed that our missiles are 100% accurate, and therefore no civilians would be hurt, when in fact our missiles are 90% accurate and some civilians were hurt?
If you can find one person to say they supported the war because they thought there would be no civilian casualties, and if only they had known there was a chance that one guy’s house would be blown up by accident (or was it an accident?) they would have opposed the war, well, I’ll be very impressed.
Such a person would have to be extraordinarily stupid.
And after all this, I still don’t know what gitfiddle’s question was.
I think a different fact is in question. In a PBS Frontline report on the first part of the war, they had Pentagon people who pointed out that none of the bombs targeted at high level people actually took out the people intended. Some number like 0 for 26. I.e., the targeted people weren’t there or the bomb missed.
The Frontline show had a scene similar to the OP. A guy’s house was next to a cafe where Saddam was supposedly having a meeting (but wasn’t). The guy comes home to rubble and a dead family. The cafe wasn’t damaged much either.
The result of course is that very early in the war this caused a lot of anger towards the US by the average Iraqi on the street.
I don’t think it’s a question (entirely) of precision but of intelligence and reliance on overly positive claims from the military. Never believe a general saying: “Sure, we can do that. No problem. No civilian casualties at all.”
Was watching a show on the Military Channel the other day where they were talking about trying to put guidance capabilities into artillary shells (its harder than you would think appearently due to the massive G-forces). Anyway, they talked a bit about laser/satellite guided missiles…and its no big secret that they aren’t 100% accurate. All kinds of things can go wrong, from pilot error (I think someone above mentioned that you have to put the bomb within a certain window of capability or it simply can’t hit the intended target), to a failure in one of the systems…to even environmental factors like excessive/unexpect wind that throws the weapon off at the end of its flight, or throws it outside of the window of its capability.
As I said, this isn’t exactly a secret…not if they are discussing it on the Military Channel so casually.
I think ftg might have figured out the question. Yeah, it’s true that none of the bombs targeted at high-level officials worked. We dropped lots of bombs on places where we thought Saddam might be, none of them hit him.
And this was a failure of intelligence, not missile accuracy. The missiles hit where the people guiding the missiles pointed them. The trouble wasn’t that the missiles missed, rather that the missiles were fired at the wrong place. Or we had an “intelligence source” who wanted some place blown up (for reasons of their own) so they told their handler that a Baath party functionary was hiding there. And we believed the source.
And Saddam famously carried out an extensive soviet-style maskirovka campaign to hide his movements and location. Targeting a PLACE works. Targeting a person, especially in a closed totalitarian country ruled by a paranoid dictator, not so much.
I still haven’t gotten to read all of the replies, but I wanted to address Lemur’s concern over my intentions.
I apologize if this was poorly worded or what not, but the question deals with two things:
The documentary said something to the effect that “of [x number] laser/satellite guided missiles, none [or *very *few] have hit their targets.” It was not saying *some *have not hit their targets, if my memory serves me correctly.
My point in asking the question is not to say that these weapons should never be used, per se, but it is apparent that if none or very few of them are hitting their targets in Iraq, then someone should seriously consider not using them because the damage they are doing is greater than the good they are doing.
So, that said, I’m not so much asking if these bombs *can work, but rather if someone knows if they have worked in Iraq.
Furthermore, I should say that I’m not trying to get the poop on evil ole’ Cheney. I’m just simply trying to find some sort of second source that will confirm or deny the claim in the movie.
*By “worked,” I mean hitting their desired target and not the house next door.
If correct, this is the quote shown after they show the man who lost his house and his family after the missile missed the palace. It leads you to believe that the “target” that was not hit was the palace, based on the belief that Saddam could be in it or that it could be rendered useless. If the antecendent “target” was Saddam, then the placement of the quote is misleading, which is why I’m asking.
OK, I get it now. You misunderstood the quote, or the quote was deliberately confusing using the word “target”.
We used a hell of a lot more than 50 laser guided missiles in the invasion of Iraq. Remember back during “active combat operations” where they talked several times about dropping bombs on locations where Saddam was thought to be? The bombs hit the locations, except Saddam wasn’t in that location anymore, if he ever had been.
So it’s not like we fired 50 missiles in the war, and all 50 went sideways and hit some guy’s house at random. The missiles were aimed, they hit what they were aimed at. It’s just in these 50 attempts to kill a specific person with a missile strike, in no case was the targeted person at the location the missile was aimed at.
Are you sure that the word “target” was misleading? I’m not disrespecting you, and I know it would be hard to prove that they all did hit their target (since the press would more likely report if the targets were missed).
Is there anyone who has any reason to think otherwise? Like I said, I’m not trying to find some dirt, but rather I’m trying to figure out the legitimacy of (the use of) the factoid.
That makes no sense. If you stop using “smart bombs”, then you pretty much have to go back to using ordinary bombs, without any sort of guidance package at all. These are considerably less accurate that the guided weapons, which not only means a higher chance of collateral damage per bomb dropped, but also means you’ll have to drop more bombs to hit the targets missed on the first attempt–which leads to more collateral damage + additional exposure of aircrew & machines.
Yes, the word “target” is misleading. When you heard “target” you assumed they meant “building” and they almost certainly meant “person.” Getting a bomb to hit a building is almost trivial now. The U.S. Air Force is spending very little money to improve the positional accuracy of its weapons. They’re spending LOTS of money making their intelligence sources more agile. Why? Because getting a bomb to hit a person means figuring out what building that person is inside, and being confident that your information is still valid during the minutes or hours it takes to get an airstrike on that location. I don’t mean to trivialize it, because it’s still a marvel of modern technology, but as long as you know that Person A is going to be in Building B at Time T, hitting them with a bomb is, well… trivial.
This YouTube video shows the AGM-130A hitting its designated target (in this case, a concrete blockhouse). There’s nothing else on the range – as long as you believe the video is a realistic depiction of what our weapons can achieve, then you’ve got to see why we use precision weapons. For the record, the AGM-130A uses human-in-the-loop terminal guidance, so someone is actually steering that bomb in with a joystick.
Strangely enough, I remember the air strikes on the Iraqi air defense sites you quoted in the BBC article. I was in the US Air Force at the time, and I remember hearing that several bombs had missed their targets. I wish I could tell you I had read some hush-hush report that blamed Chinese GPS jammers… but I didn’t, and even if I had read such a report, I couldn’t tell you about it here. I don’t know why we missed those targets, and in the absence of a follow-up article about it, I don’t think you or I will ever know.
In that article, “target” means person. We certainly wouldn’t miss 50 out of 50 buildings targeted. That doesn’t mean we’d hit 50 out of 50 buildings either. The article means that if the target is not in the building then the bomb missed the target.
