Read Online Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins by Andrew Cockburn - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Andrew Cockburn
Tags: United States, History, Military, Political Science, Weapons, Political Freedom, Security (National & International)
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Deptula, Perry, Marshall, and others was not the war that had been fought. True, most of Iraq’s power supply had been knocked out on the first night or shortly afterward, reducing Iraqi civilian society to a preindustrial state in one stroke. All major bridges met the same fate, as did the phone system, TV, and radio. The Iraqi army had certainly been hard hit from the air, though most of the damage was inflicted not by the huge allied fleet of high-speed jets but by a force of 122 A-10s that had been reluctantly dispatched by the air force to the Gulf at the urgent insistence of commander in chief General Norman Schwarzkopf. Thanks to its carefully designed attributes of ruggedness and maneuverability at low altitudes, the plane proved supremely effective at destroying Iraqi armor and other units in the field, so much so that the emotional General Horner was famously moved to signal the Pentagon that “the A-10 saved my ass.”
Meanwhile, despite expectations (and media exhortations to “go after” the Iraqi dictator), Saddam Hussein, the “first circle,” had been neither hit nor cut off from control of his government. Inevitably, he had reacted and adapted. As former Iraqi military intelligence chief Wafiq al-Sammarai explained to me later, “Saddam would come to my headquarters every day but at random times. He traveled in an ordinary Baghdad taxi, just with a driver. No guards or entourage.” Al-Sammarai himself had moved out of his headquarters a day before the war and watched from his new location as the U.S. carefully gutted his empty former office.
Even systems that had demonstrably failed could bask in the warm glow of the technological triumph. Thus JSTARS’ side-looking radar, the system originally developed for Assault Breaker to detect Soviet tank columns, could find no sign of the mobile Scud launchers moving stealthily about the deserts of western Iraq, despite their being the highest-priority target of the war. (The two prototypes of this system used in the war zone were inside preowned Boeing 707s. Previously used to ship cattle around the Middle East, they stank of cow manure.)
Needless to say, the various official and semiofficial post mortems did not stress such aspects of the conflict, and so the merits of pinpoint accuracy and invisible planes went unchallenged while the relevant weapons programs, and the corporations that sold them, grew and prospered. Only in 1996, when the General Accounting Office published the results of a diligent three-year investigation, did light dawn on what had actually happened. The F-117 had not flown unescorted and unafraid to its targets. It always needed the company of many escorting planes dedicated to jamming the enemy radars that supposedly could not see the Lockheed plane anyhow. So far from “one target, one bomb,” it had taken an average of four of the most accurate laser weapons, and sometimes ten, to destroy a target. Overall, the investigators concluded, “Many of DOD’s and manufacturers’ postwar claims about weapons system performance … were overstated, misleading, inconsistent with the best available data, or unverifiable.”
It didn’t make any difference. By the time the investigators issued their sobering findings, the revolution in military affairs was carrying all before it. Though defense spending overall sank for a few years—the superpower enemy poised to pour through the Fulda Gap had disappeared, after all—research in and development of all the exciting possibilities foreshadowed in the Desert Storm triumph roared ahead, much of it aimed at the same goals that Igloo White and Task Force Alpha had pursued so many years before.
Catchphrases such as “system of systems” and “net-centric warfare,” introduced in the 1990s, were still expressions of the idea that it is feasible to collect, sift, and use information with a minimum of human intervention. “If we are able to view a strategic battlefield and prevent an
Meanwhile, despite expectations (and media exhortations to “go after” the Iraqi dictator), Saddam Hussein, the “first circle,” had been neither hit nor cut off from control of his government. Inevitably, he had reacted and adapted. As former Iraqi military intelligence chief Wafiq al-Sammarai explained to me later, “Saddam would come to my headquarters every day but at random times. He traveled in an ordinary Baghdad taxi, just with a driver. No guards or entourage.” Al-Sammarai himself had moved out of his headquarters a day before the war and watched from his new location as the U.S. carefully gutted his empty former office.
Even systems that had demonstrably failed could bask in the warm glow of the technological triumph. Thus JSTARS’ side-looking radar, the system originally developed for Assault Breaker to detect Soviet tank columns, could find no sign of the mobile Scud launchers moving stealthily about the deserts of western Iraq, despite their being the highest-priority target of the war. (The two prototypes of this system used in the war zone were inside preowned Boeing 707s. Previously used to ship cattle around the Middle East, they stank of cow manure.)
Needless to say, the various official and semiofficial post mortems did not stress such aspects of the conflict, and so the merits of pinpoint accuracy and invisible planes went unchallenged while the relevant weapons programs, and the corporations that sold them, grew and prospered. Only in 1996, when the General Accounting Office published the results of a diligent three-year investigation, did light dawn on what had actually happened. The F-117 had not flown unescorted and unafraid to its targets. It always needed the company of many escorting planes dedicated to jamming the enemy radars that supposedly could not see the Lockheed plane anyhow. So far from “one target, one bomb,” it had taken an average of four of the most accurate laser weapons, and sometimes ten, to destroy a target. Overall, the investigators concluded, “Many of DOD’s and manufacturers’ postwar claims about weapons system performance … were overstated, misleading, inconsistent with the best available data, or unverifiable.”
It didn’t make any difference. By the time the investigators issued their sobering findings, the revolution in military affairs was carrying all before it. Though defense spending overall sank for a few years—the superpower enemy poised to pour through the Fulda Gap had disappeared, after all—research in and development of all the exciting possibilities foreshadowed in the Desert Storm triumph roared ahead, much of it aimed at the same goals that Igloo White and Task Force Alpha had pursued so many years before.
Catchphrases such as “system of systems” and “net-centric warfare,” introduced in the 1990s, were still expressions of the idea that it is feasible to collect, sift, and use information with a minimum of human intervention. “If we are able to view a strategic battlefield and prevent an
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