Hit smarter, not harder?

Gulf War strikes marked a sea change in air tactics

(CNN) -- For half a century, the word "bomber" conjured up images of the massive, lumbering B-52, dropping thousands of bombs and flattening a broad swath of terrain. That was the model inherited from World War II, and it survived when the Cold War prediction was for a massive, all-out war between two superpowers. But Desert Storm brought a new sort of bombing, driven by technology rather than brute tonnage.

"Smart weapons" saw their first use in the Vietnam War, in the form of bombs that glided along a laser beam to their targets. That required one aircraft to drop the bomb and another "spotter" aircraft or ground team to point the laser. In Desert Storm, a smart bomb provided one of the most memorable television clips of the war, pinpointing an elevator shaft at the Iraqi Air Force headquarters in Baghdad.

But "smart weapons" -- the military calls them precision-guided munitions (PGMs) -- weren't widely used in 1991. Only 244 laser-guided bombs and 88 cruise missiles hit Iraq, out of a total of some 250,000 bombs dropped during the war. But while the venerable B-52 dropped tons of old-fashioned explosives on troop concentrations in northern and southern Iraq, the strikes on Baghdad were relatively few and tightly targeted. The rise of smart weapons led to a new military theory -- "surgical strikes."

"Two raids of 300 B-17 bombers could not achieve with 3,000 bombs what two F-117s can do with only four," Gen. Buster C. Glosson, the planner of the Gulf War air strikes, wrote in 1992. "Of the 85,000 tons of bombs used in the Gulf War, only 8,000 tons (less than 10 percent) were PGMs, yet they accounted for 75 percent of the damage." More precisely targeted weapons, the argument goes, harm fewer civilians.

War by remote control

If Desert Storm was an audition for PGMs, the Pentagon was impressed by what it saw. In the conflicts that marked the post-Cold War years, computer-driven weapons were increasingly front and center. After a mission in Somalia went disastrously wrong, the American military came under increasing pressure to keep American troops out of harm's way. Smart weapons fit the bill.

Tomahawk cruise missiles, which can be fired from hundreds of miles away and follow the terrain to their targets, were used against Iraq in 1996 and 1998, against suspected terrorist targets in Afghanistan and Sudan in 1998 and as part of the air strikes against Serbia in 1999. Newer generations of plane-launched smart bombs and missiles also help keep pilots safe, operating from what the military calls "stand-off" distance -- outside the range of anti-aircraft weapons that may be guarding the target. In Serbia, NATO planes flew some 31,000 missions without a single casualty. Two planes were shot down, an American F-16 and F-117, but both pilots ejected safely.

But if smart weapons create the illusion of bloodless war, they do not create the reality. By NATO's estimate, 10,000 Serbian soldiers were killed or wounded and 1,500 Serbian civilians were killed and 5,000 wounded in the air strikes. The newest precision-guided bombs, which get their position from Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites, went exactly where they were told. They hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, demonstrating that the smartest weapons are only as good as the intelligence that aims them.