Read Online Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins by Andrew Cockburn - Free Book Online Page A

Within a few days, residential streets in affluent districts of the capital bore the stench of meat that had rotted in freezers left without power. Adding to the triumph were the TV broadcasts of videos beamed from the bombs’ cameras as they unerringly zeroed in on their targets. For the first time the public at home could watch and thrill at the air force’s “precision and lethality” administered with cool professional efficiency. (The navy, to its chagrin, had not installed the necessary equipment for broadcasting the videos and was thus bested in the public relations war.) Publicity regarding the hitherto highly secret Lockheed F-117 stealth bomber, with its excitingly futuristic design and mystique of invisibility, only added to the allure. As Lockheed publicists reported, on the first night of the war, the plane had “collapsed Saddam Hussein’s air defenses and all but eliminated Iraq’s ability to wage coordinated war.” Not to be outdone, Texas Instruments, makers of the Paveway III laser bomb-guidance system, advertised “one target, one bomb.”
    Even at the time there were some disquieting indications that not everything was going as predicted. Though the Iraqi air force had been easily neutralized, the Iraqi army remained obdurately in place in Kuwait, clearly still receiving and responding to orders from Baghdad. When Iraqi Scuds fired from mobile launchers started landing on Tel Aviv, intense surveillance efforts using all available technologies failed to find a single launcher. The Iraqi army was driven out of Kuwait only when attacked and outmaneuvered by U.S. and allied ground troops. Saddam, the one-man innermost ring, remained alive and in charge.
    Nevertheless, the impression prevailed that the war had been an unalloyed triumph for airborne technology. The promises of Foster, Westmoreland, Perry, and Deptula had been dramatically vindicated, as some of them were happy to point out. Writing soon after the war, Perry celebrated the success of various systems he had fostered and championed, including JSTARS and other surveillance systems—“manned and unmanned”—that had tracked the enemy on a continual basis, not to mention the stealth bombers, 80 percent of whose bombs, he claimed, had destroyed their targets. Andrew Marshall was quick to catch the wave, encouraging a military assistant, Andrew Krepinevich, to pen a pamphlet, “The Military-Technical Revolution: A Preliminary Assessment,” that echoed Warden’s nostrums about centers of gravity, precision strikes, and other possibilities of the new technology. A year later it was reissued with the catchier title “Revolution in Military Affairs,” a phrase that was soon firmly lodged in the defense-intellectual lexicon.
    Deptula, who had moved back to the air staff headquarters in Washington, also took to print. The operation he had planned and directed, he began telling the world, had marked a “Change in the Nature of Warfare.” The new technologies, especially stealth, had spawned “parallel warfare,” whereby it was possible to attack and disable an enemy in one fell swoop, rather than sequentially eliminating air defenses and then other targets, thus foreclosing the enemy’s ability to recover.
    Over time, Deptula expanded his vision, unveiling the concept of effects-based operations, the notion that precision now made it possible “not just to impede the means of the enemy to conduct war or the will of the people to continue war, but the very ability of the enemy to control its vital functions.” In other words, it was now possible so thoroughly to understand the way an enemy system functioned, its “centers of gravity,” as he (and Warden) termed it, as to predict precisely the reverberating effects of destroying a particular target. It was a beguiling concept, especially to the air force at a time when the disappearance of the Soviet enemy threatened U.S. military budget cuts.
    Unfortunately, the Gulf War as invoked by