Posted on 10/11/2002 12:50:48 AM PDT by HAL9000
Microwaving Saddam: New weapons likely to see combat
Prototypes could paralyze Iraqi military
Space-age warfare may be used in attack against Baghdad regime
Ed Blanche
Special to The Daily Star
Saddam Hussein may be in for a shock - literally - after telling US President George W. Bush to do his worst in the looming war against Iraq. It seems possible that his command network will become the first target of high-power microwave (HPM) weapons, probably carried by cruise missiles or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). These squirt pulses of high-frequency energy that can knock out electronic and communications systems in milliseconds, scrambling computer memories, thus disabling military nerve centers and leaving forces in the field leaderless, confused and vulnerable.
Even command and control complexes and weapons production facilities buried deep under the ground in bunkers, largely immune to conventional attacks with high explosives, can be rendered useless by aiming the microwave bursts at above-ground antennas, water pipes and air conduits that will transmit the energy pulses into the facilities.
And centers like these, along with air defense installations such as surface-to-air missile (SAM) batteries and radars, will be the first targets that will be hit if - or more likely, when - the Americans launch their assault on Iraq in a bid to topple Saddam’s regime.
The idea is that once the military chain of command has been effectively severed, Iraqi units in the field, unable to communicate with their headquarters or each other, many of their electronically controlled weapons systems immobilized, can be picked off one by one by US forces. Large-scale battles which require the synchronized deployment of Iraqi formations can thus be avoided.
The US and British militaries have been conducting tests with HPM systems, which are designated as directed energy weapons along with lasers, for some time. Britain’s Ministry of Defense successfully tested a prototype directed energy weapons (DEW) package recently, with some of the tests conducted in the US.
Military experts say it is conceivable that a prototype weapon could be deployed within a few months and could be ready for combat use in Iraq, although probably on a limited scale. The respected US publication Aviation Week and Space Technology reported in August that any assault on Iraq “is expected to see the first use of high-power microwave weapons.”
It said that one option was a high-power radio frequency system, designed by Britain’s BAE Systems and mounted on a cruise missile, which is “closer to operational use” than the microwave and laser technologies that have been under development for the last few years.
The short-range device produces a broad-band pulse of radio frequency energy that can disable computers, radars, radios and other electronic systems within a radius of 15 meters. Because it operates at lower frequencies and across a wider spectrum than HPM weapons, it can generate much greater power with less effort, thus inflicting more damage.
Saddam’s military was horrifically mauled by US-led allied forces in the 1991 Gulf War by dint of the Americans’ high-tech weapons systems, but it remains a formidable foe. The Bush administration is wrestling with the problem of what kind of force it will need to achieve its stated objective of “regime change” in Baghdad. It would prefer to use its air power to the fullest extent to work with limited formations of highly mobile Special Forces and assault troops, rather than launch a full-scale invasion involving up to 200,000 troops with heavy armor and artillery.
One of the administration’s biggest fears is getting dragged into urban warfare, for which its forces are generally not suited or trained. The prospect that Saddam, having learned the hard lesson from 1991 of deploying his forces in the southern deserts where they were decimated by US air power and artillery, will concentrate his best units in Baghdad and other cities is the “nightmare scenario,” according to General Joseph Hoar, the former head of US Central Command (Centcom), which will conduct operations in Iraq.
The Americans say they also want to limit “collateral damage” - sanitized Pentagon-speak for killing and maiming civilians - since it’s Saddam’s murderous regime they are after, not the Iraqi people, who they say they want to liberate.
A case could thus be made for the use of directed energy weapons, which would supposedly help minimize civilian casualties. However, even the widespread use of precision-guided munitions in the conflict in Afghanistan, which Centcom commander General Tommy Franks called “the most accurate war ever fought in this nation’s history,” did not prevent hundreds of civilian casualties, some of them in errant air strikes.
The deployment of directed energy weapons, which are very much still in their infancy as far as operational use in combat is concerned, is not going to be extensive. The Americans will rely primarily on precision-guided munitions, whose use has increased dramatically since the 1991 war. In that conflict, 7-8 percent of the ordnance dropped were “smart bombs.” In the Kosovo campaign, which was fought almost exclusively from the air, the percentage rose to about 56 percent. In the Afghan campaign it was around 90 percent. Saddam and his generals cannot but be aware of what they are facing this time around.
Be that as it may, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has conceded that US air power on its own will not bring down Saddam’s regime. “The Iraq problem cannot be solved by air strikes alone,” he told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Sept. 19. “We simply do not know where all, or even a large portion, of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction facilities are. We do not know where a fraction of them are. Of the facilities we do know of, not all are vulnerable to attack from the air. A good many are underground and deeply buried. Others are purposely located near population centers, schools, hospitals, mosques, where an air strike could kill a large number of innocent people.”
That may seem light years away from the macabre logic of an American Army major who, straight-faced, told Peter Arnett, one of the leading correspondents of the Vietnam War, after US forces had reduced the Mekong Delta town of Ben Tre to smoldering ruins during the Viet Cong’s Tet offensive in 1967: “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” But given the hawk-heavy Bush administration’s current obsession with getting rid of Saddam, it may not be that far away when the shooting starts.
The directed energy weapons now emerging are an important element in the rapid technological advances under way in the US, along with Britain and more recently France and Germany, that are reshaping the strategies and tools of warfare, just as the use of the horse, the chariot, the longbow, gunpowder, combustion power, automatic weapons, aircraft, the tank, the microchip and nuclear fission did throughout history.
Jane’s Defense Weekly recently identified five often overlapping technologies that have emerged in recent years which it said were the “leading contenders to revolutionize militaries over the next 15-20 years: robotics, advanced power and propulsion, miniaturization, mobile and adaptive digital networks, and leap-ahead advances in biological sciences. The effective application of those five technologies could hold the key to military power in the coming decades.”
For the moment, the development of HPM systems remains largely classified. But in recent weeks the shroud of secrecy has been lifted a little as speculation has mounted that they will be used against Iraq. For the moment, these are seen as one-time-use weapons mounted on UAVs or cruise missiles. This is primarily because at this stage of their development they are only effective at comparatively short range - up to 300 meters or so - which in the case of strikes against heavily defended installations, such as SAM sites or command centers, would put the crews of manned aircraft carrying such weapons at monumental risk.
Currently, the delivery systems for HPM weapons are considered to be expendable and are envisaged to carry out one-way missions. The systems themselves are limited to “a squirt or two” of microwave pulses because the battery packs which produce the power have to be small. The priority now is to develop onboard power sources, capable of producing much greater energy, on recoverable cruise missiles capable of landing on friendly territory after carrying out a multi-target HPM mission.
US defense companies such as Lockheed Martin and TRW as well as BAE of Britain are working on this. Raytheon is working on the design of a microwave weapon for Boeing’s X-45 unmanned combat air vehicle (UCAV) for the US Air Force. Boeing is understood to be working on a system that uses a drive shaft from the X-45’s engine to generate the electricity, which would allow the UCAV to strike multiple targets before returning to base, providing it isn’t shot down. US and British experts believe reusable HPM will be feasible within a couple of years.
The other main focus of directed-energy weapons is the laser - a lethal, longer-range weapon, but its development is two or three years behind that of the microwave system. While HPM weapons need only milliseconds to do their work, low-frequency lasers on airborne platforms, which produce extremely small beams of destructive energy, need up to four seconds to destroy their targets.
Lockheed Martin’s multi-role F-35, the Joint Strike Fighter, that is expected to go into service within a decade, is expected to be armed with a laser weapon. It too would be powered by a drive shaft from the aircraft’s engine. The AC-130 gunship - a version of the venerable Hercules transport aircraft - is also likely to be equipped with laser weapons to add to its already fearsome firepower.
The US Defense Science Board believes within five years aircraft systems will be able to produce one megawatt of power for directed energy weapons. A first-generation laser weapon, requiring about 100 kilowatts of power, would be able to engage aircraft and missiles in flight as well as ground targets.
Further along the road there is the plasma weapon, which would employ ionized gas molecules and which, it is said, would have the destructive power of a bolt of lightning.
The Russians area head of us on this stuff apparently.
That may seem light years away from the macabre logic of an American Army major who, straight-faced, told Peter Arnett, one of the leading correspondents of the Vietnam War, after US forces had reduced the Mekong Delta town of Ben Tre to smoldering ruins during the Viet Cong’s Tet offensive in 1967: “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”
Seems to me the entire article was probably written as window dressing for above sentence. </sarcasm>
Henry Gruver, I saw Russians Attack the USA
He may have seen the result of an E-Bomb.
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