Replies

I should add, that having just watched the video, the Zarqawi safe house isn't in a neighborhood. It is in a grove of trees fronted by a single street. There are no other buildings around it. The video is shot from the aircraft that lased the first bomb into the target. His laser starts firing 11 seconds prior to impact. When the bomb impacts it is a standard high order detonation from a standard Mk-82 bomb body. It blows out the weakest points of all four walls (the middle) and throws a cloud of debris through the roof. This was nothing more than a typical laser guided bomb delivery against a not so typical target. The guys who dropped the bomb are experts, just like all the guys from all the services flying over Iraq. Anyone of them could have done the exact same thing. And no doubt all of them wish they had been given the opportunity.

My point earlier was that there is a lot of know-how, science, and planning that goes into all of this. Even a standard Paveway, a lightning or sniper pod, etc. is pretty impressive if you think about it.

Another example: If you go to BIAP there is a Mosque (with a blue roof) nearby. Close to this Mosque the former regime built Republican Guard complexes on two sides. The idea is that if you want to bomb those Republican Guard facilities you have to damage if not destroy the Mosque as well. The Mosque is untouched! On both sides (And I literally mean just yards away) BOTH Republican guard facilities are pulverized. Nothing but heaps of rubble. If you drive just 2 miles and go to the West side of BIAP where the old aircraft bunkers are at you’d see that every single one has a nice hole in the roof. Nice clean hole with no misses (No craters except in the bunkers). These bombs punched through about 3 feet of concrete, 9 feet of sand, and then another 2 feet of heavily reinforced concrete. Judging from the mess inside the bunkers, nothing survived that. The sides of the bunkers are well sloped and even the few bombs that didn’t exactly hit the center roof still detonated hitting the side slopes. Very impressive to say the least.

The point I’m making is simple. There is a high degree of planning, a lot of science, training, money, experience (lessons learned) behind this. Those planes that busted those bunkers probably were carrying something very different than the plane blowing up the Rep. Guard facilities. The building (4 or 5 story) that had its entire guts blown out but all the walls still standing in Baghdad that I saw, probably was not hit with the same ordinance and most likely delivered on the Republican Guard Facilities near BIAP.

They marry up the appropriate airframe to the mission, load it out with the ideal ordinance for the effect desired, and then deliver this ordinance in a manner to maximize what it is they want to achieve. In some cases, as in 1991, they actually custom manufacture ordinance for a specific target. Just think about the complexity in the whole targeting process, developing target folders, determining BDA, logistically supporting those planes, assuring the right quantity or ordinance is present at the right place in time, maintaining the planes, and and and……. It's all quite impressive.