U.S. military precision-bombing skills and capabilities have advanced
in recent years, but there still is much room for improvement, said
a Pentagon advisory panel.
Among the shortcomings that hinder U.S. air-to-ground precision-strike
missions, the panel said, are unreliable target identification technologies
and difficulties in defeating enemy deception tactics.
The Defense Science Board began a study on precision targeting
about a year ago and has briefed its findings to senior Pentagon
officials in recent months. The DSB recommendations will focus,
among other things, on the need to share targeting data among the
military services and to expedite development of advanced sensors
for intelligence collection, said Diane Wright, assistant director
for air warfare, at the office of the undersecretary of defense
for acquisition, technology and logistics.
“We are very good at precision strike,” she told a
conference of the Precision Strike Association. “We have laser
designators to guide weapons down airshafts and through windows.”
However, she added, “There is plenty of room for problems
in this very complicated process.”
These problems include the ability of U.S. aircrews to positively
identify targets that are not in visual range and to hit moving
targets even when they hide under cover, concealment and decoys.
The DSB said that the Defense Department should focus on developing
a capability to link a “targeting database” of precise
geographic coordinates with the sensors on reconnaissance or strike
platforms.
Ideally, said Wright, a pilot would be able to point and click
on a digital map and automatically receive that target’s coordinates
from the database. She called that capability a “gridlock”
system.
The National Imagery and Mapping Agency manages the so-called digital
point positioning database, or DPPDB. It is the Defense Department’s
primary source for targeting information and imagery for GPS-guided
weapons.
The gridlock would automate the “geo-registration process
for both still imagery and motion imagery,” said Wright. The
goal would be to link that process to surveillance and tactical
platforms, she said. “If you can tie the platform sensors
to the related PPDB database, you can establish a relationship,
so you can get PGM-quality target coordinates, just by pointing
at the target on the tactical imagery.”
Every platform would lock to the same grid, she said, “so
you can share target coordinates without the need for imagery, therefore
reducing demand for wideband communications.”
This technology, she said, could be transitioned to the Joint Strike
Fighter and might be tested with the Predator unmanned aircraft
motion imagery.
According to one industry official, the growing emphasis on “open
architectures” in military workstations used for targeting
missions will help the services share new software applications
constantly being developed by the intelligence community. “There
are so many collection systems—for imagery, signals intelligence,
etc.—that being able to present diverse information in a coherent
way is an enormous engineering job,” said Don Bently, program
manager at BAE Systems.
A shift to open architectures in computer systems, he said, “should
be a major step toward resolving interoperability problems.”
BAE Systems makes the so-called precision-targeting workstation
for the U.S. Navy.
The Defense Science Board also recommended that the Pentagon accelerate
the development of a modular advanced electronically-scanned-array
radar with ground moving target indicator (GMTI). Wright said that
the panel urged the Defense Department to spend more money on new
systems such as foliage penetration (FOPEN) radar and precision
signals intelligence (SIGINT) to be used for targeting. A combination
of GMTI and FOPEN technologies, she said, could be used to create
a “GMTI sentry” that would survey enemy strongholds
and “effectively engage [targets] as they emerge from hiding.”
The problems highlighted in the DSB study were seen in real-world
operations over Afghanistan (against the ruling Taliban regime)
in October, when errant bombs killed and injured civilians who were
not the intended U.S. targets. In one instance, a Navy F/A-18 Hornet
dropped a 1,000-pound, laser-guided bomb on a warehouse used by
the International Committee of the Red Cross in northern Kabul.
The Pentagon said that was an unintentional strike, which apparently
had been aimed at the Kabul airport, a couple of kilometers away.
Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Gregory S. Newbold, the Joint Staff’s
director of operations, told reporters that the number of missed
targets was “minuscule,” in the context of the air war
overall. Over a three-week span in October, the United States and
allies launched more than 3,000 bombs and missiles against targets
in Afghanistan.
During one weekend in mid-October, at least three U.S. bombs were
reported to hit civilian sites, unintentionally. A Navy F-14 dropped
two 500-pound bombs on a residential area near Kabul. According
to Pentagon officials, the fighter had been aiming at enemy vehicles
parked less than a mile away. In a separate strike mission, an F/A-18
was aiming at a Taliban storage facility but instead struck a field
in the vicinity of a home for the elderly.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that incidents of misfires,
regardless of whether they are caused by equipment failure or human
error, should be accepted as realities of war.