TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/022591/0225993.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.8 KB | 128 lines

                                                                                THE GULF WAR, Page 27

THE AIR WAR

How Targets Are Chosen


The tragedy in Baghdad reveals the painstaking methods used to
identify military installations and -- usually -- to spare
civilians

By BRUCE W. NELAN -- Reported by William Dowell/Dhahran and
Bruce van Voorst/Washington


    The Stealth fighter-bombers located their target in the 4
a.m. darkness over Baghdad. Their laser-guided, 2,000-lb. bombs
hit their mark with pinpoint accuracy. They cut through 12 ft.
of reinforced concrete and exploded, peeling away the
protective cover and destroying the bunker.

    It was a perfect example of the kind of precise,
high-technology air war the allies have conducted against Iraq.
It was also a tragedy: the bunker was filled with Iraqi
civilians who had taken refuge there from nighttime raids on
the capital. But U.S. officials insisted that there had been
no mistake and the bunker was, in fact, a military
communications center. "From the military point of view, nothing
went wrong," said Brigadier General Richard Neal, the briefing
officer in Saudi Arabia. "The target was hit as designated."

    In recent wars most civilian casualties have come among
those who have had the misfortune to live near military
installations and to be hit by badly aimed bombs. That has
probably occurred in Baghdad as well, but not this time. The
dispute here is whether the bunker was an ordinary civilian
bomb shelter, as the Iraqis insist, or a former shelter
recently converted to military use, as the U.S. command
maintains.

    American officers say flatly they do not target civilian
buildings. This is something they have stressed since the war
began, and the overall allied commander, General H. Norman
Schwarzkopf, contends that his pilots take additional risks to
avoid hitting civilians. Pilots approach targets closer than
might otherwise be the case, flying lower and slower. They take
extra time on the bombing run, which means they are more
vulnerable to Iraqi missiles.

    The intelligence analysis U.S. officials offered last week
to buttress their case reveals a great deal about the
painstaking methods they use in the air war in the gulf.
Preparations for the strike on the bunker began months before
the bombs actually fell. The CIA, for example, interviewed
contractors and workers, including Koreans and Pakistanis, who
constructed the bunker and about 20 others like it in Baghdad
during the Iran-Iraq war.

    Satellite photographs of the building showed at least two
additions: a newly hardened roof and communications equipment
that was protected against the electromagnetic effects of
nuclear blasts. The satellites also snapped pictures of
military vehicles parked outside and men in uniform entering
and exiting the building. A wire-mesh fence surrounded the
bunker; its roof had been painted with camouflage and fake bomb
holes.

    The clincher came last month, when U.S. intelligence
satellites picked up radio transmissions from the bunker,
sending orders to Iraqi military units in the Kuwait theater
of operations. Missing from the accumulated evidence were any
photos of civilians entering the bunker at night in search of
safety. American officers say they assumed that civilians were
being kept out because it was a military security area and the
wire-mesh fence was there for that purpose.

    This particular bunker became a target because of the
effectiveness of earlier U.S. attacks on Baghdad. In the
opening days of the war, the allies' strategic objective was
to "decapitate" the Iraqi armed forces, to cut Saddam Hussein
and his top officers off from the army in the south. Bombing
raids were mounted to destroy command headquarters and military
communications centers in the heart of the capital. As these
were knocked out, the task of coordinating the armed forces was
decentralized to secondary posts in the suburbs -- like the one
hit last week.

    Weeks before the war began, the U.S. Central Command had
compiled a priority list of targets. At the top, along with
command-and-control facilities, were military production
centers, power and water supplies, and bridges and roads
leading south to Kuwait. Most of those have been destroyed. The
main bombing wave is moving south, onto the Iraqi army that is
dug in facing Saudi Arabia.

    Attacking a tank in the desert is far less ambiguous than
picking out one building in a crowded neighborhood for
demolition. The campaign against Iraq's dug-in divisions is a
textbook exercise in air warfare: hundreds of planes are in the
sky every day, with F-15s flying a protective patrol high
above, while attack planes blast away at tanks, artillery
pieces and ammunition dumps below.

    Fighter-bomber pilots have divided the battlefield into
small, lettered squares on the map called "killing zones."
Working their way across the desert, sector by sector, spotters
direct strike planes onto specific targets on the ground.
Electronic-warfare planes black out ground-based Iraqi radar,
as airborne tankers circle lazily to refuel the fighters that
line up behind them. The whole armada is choreographed by
controllers in AWACs radar planes, who see everything in the air
for more than 200 miles in any direction. The Iraqis in
Kuwait, says Captain Jessie Morimoto, a U.S. Air Force
intelligence officer, have "stopped operating as a national
army. What they're doing now is trying to defend themselves as
people."

    These direct attacks on Iraqi forces have already destroyed
as much as a third of their armor and artillery. Warfare will
never be foolproof, and air power alone has yet to win a war.
But once the ground attack begins, allied pilots will learn
soon enough whether their efforts have greatly improved the
chances for a swift breakthrough.