Hammers of the Gods

摘要

There was a time in the distant past of military technological history ― about 12 years ago ― where the US husbanded precision-guided weapons (a.k.a. "smart bombs") for particularly sensitive or inconveniently located high-value targets. While the Persian Gulf War of 1990-91 is recalled in the collective mind's eye as a CNN video montage of individual bridges, buildings, and tanks blowing up as if by divine wrath, in reality only about six percent of the weapons dropped by US and allied pilots had some form of precision guidance. The rest were good old-fashioned iron bombs, very much similar to the sort the pilots' grandfathers dropped prodigiously on the Axis in WW II, killing millions of civilians. Targeting has been the hobgoblin of bomber crews and mission planners since somebody first got the idea of tossing a grenade out of an open-cockpit biplane. Precision-aided weapons began as an attempt to improve on the use of the Mk I eyeball as a way to hit what is supposed to be hit without having to fly the same mission again and again. The Vietnam War saw the introduction of TV-guided and, later, laser-guided weapons. With TV guidance, the pilot or operator steers a weapon that is equipped with a TV camera by means of radio-frequency commands, which required the shooter to remain exposed to enemy counter-fire. Laser-guidance, where a seeker in the nose of the weapon senses reflected light of a particular wavelength from a laser designator, enabled a third party to "paint" the target so the attacking aircraft could shoot and scoot. The disadvantage here is that somebody ― either another aircraft or a forward-observer team ― has to be close enough to the target and have a clear line of sight to it. This is dangerous, possibly intolerably so in situations where the enemy commands the ground. Moreover, cloud cover can make the use of laser-guided bombs impossible. The laser spot tracker of the bomb has to be able to pick up that laser reflection, which it cannot do through cloud cover, smoke, dust, or other obscuring conditions.