Power tool (How the Tomahawk changed everything)

Guardian ^ | 3/21/2003 | Oliver Burkeman

[ArcLight]

At 1.30pm on Monday June 20 1977, tranquillity prevailed in the calm waters off San Clemente island, a chunk of land 60 miles from the coast of California that is home to a hook-billed songbird called the loggerhead shrike, a rare species of fox, and a handful of US Navy scientists. Then, at 1.33, the silence was shattered by a roar. A slim grey missile blasted from a military submarine, through the ocean's surface and shot towards the sky. It reached an altitude of 2,000ft. Then it wobbled. And then millions of dollars of research and development money came crashing back down into the Pacific, and silence returned.

As missile tests go, it was hardly one of the more auspicious. President Carter made no public comments about it, and it received barely a mention in the newspapers of the day. The navy scientists watching in the company of the loggerhead shrike (and, most likely, a Soviet spy satellite) could not have known that they were witnessing the beginning of an era that would come to redefine not only the shape of the US military arsenal but the very way that America - and the entire world - thinks about killing and war.

[ArcLight]

I'm back, and again posting material from an (eek!) left-wing source. So what? It's still an excellent essay about the social and political implications of precision weaponry.

[KansasCanadian]

It can hit "a target the size of a mailbox with almost as much accuracy as the postal service," Fortune magazine declared

I don't find that information all that comforting lol

[Notforprophet]

You were gone somewhere?

[DaughterOfAnIwoJimaVet]

Thanks for posting this!

[KarlInOhio]

"During the second world war, an average B-17 bomb during a bombing run missed its target by some 2,300ft," ... "Therefore, if you wanted a 90% probability of hitting a particular target, you had to drop some 9,000 bombs. That required a bombing run of 1,000 bombers and placed 1,000 men at risk. "

Come on, Guardian. Get a little fact checking here. Are you saing that B-17s were single man aircraft?

[pabianice]

But the B-52 bomber, which was formerly the ultimate symbol of American military might, conveyed a meaning that was different in almost every other way. The 40-year-old colossus of the US air force communicated to the enemy nothing so much as overwhelming brute force and irresistible size. Boeing's workhorse plane is still very much in use - B-52s dropped a third of the bombs used in Iraq during Operation Desert Storm and they will be used in this conflict - but it has been replaced as the symbol of the American military.

50-year-old, actually. The B-52 is today being flown by the grandchildren of the people who designed it. Not bad.

[SMEDLEYBUTLER]

50-year-old, actually.

Actually, the H models, the only ones still flying, were built in 1961-1962, the last one built was delivered on 26 October 1962. So 40 is accurate, 50 is not.

[RayChuang88]

I think what the article points out is simple: today's weapons are so accurate that we're at the point (literally) of hitting targets with well under 10 meter (32.8 feet) circular error of probability (CEP)--and that's with no need to use a laser designator for the weapon to home in on or use a TV camera on the weapon to guide it!

It has essentially made most man-made structures no longer safe in wartime, because with that type of accuracy even fairly deep bunkers are no longer proof against attack. It's likely that the target we hit Wednesday night (US time) used a combination of GPS-buided larger JDAM bombs dropped from B-2's and laser-guided bombs dropped from F-117's to cave in the bunker.

[KeyWest]

One normal fact here is the failure of the first launch. The current group of dems against all weapons use initial failure to condemn a new weapons system. With that logic, we would never have any new system, since all have failures.

[discostu]

They conspicuously dropped a zero earlier in the article (is was to the right of a comma so rather obvious), I'm guessing the web stuff isn't very well typo-proofed.

[ArcLight]

Oh, yeah. JimRob temporarily booted me for posting something from AlterNet. It was a fascinating piece, much commented upon in conservative circles, in which a leftist called an American victory in Iraq "the worst-case scenario" that could discredit the peace movement.

It was a fascinating, hilarious, thoroughly nutty item--James Taranto even picked it up for the Wall Street Journal's "Best of the Web Today," as an example of how the left wing has gone utterly bonkers.

But for reasons quite unclear to me, JimRob hath decreed that nothing from AlterNet may be posted here. So he kicked me for a week.

I gotta admit, I don't get it. The above piece is from a different left-wing rag, The Guardian. Why this post is permitted and the other is not is a question far above my IQ or pay grade.

In any case, it's JimRob's ballgame, and so he gets to make the rules. So no more AlterNet. Hmmm...wonder what'll happen when I post something from The Nation? :-)

[rudypoot]

"It was Philippe Morillon, the flamboyant French commander in Bosnia, who snorted of the US military: "Who are these soldiers who are ready to kill and not ready to die?"

Ahhh, the French. The object of war is to kill people and break stuff, not dying.

[ArcLight]

Yeah, I guess this French guy never heard Gen. Patton's famous dictum: You don't win wars by dying for your country but by ensuring the other fellow dies for his. Never saw the movie, I expect....

[Valin]

BUFF the ultimate in close air support.