SMART BOMBS, DUMB TARGETS

Our bombs were plenty smart. But our tar­get­ing dur­ing Gulf War II was dumb. Of the 50 “decap­i­ta­tion strikes” American forces launched dur­ing the con­flict, none took out their intended marks in the Iraqi lead­er­ship.
Slate’s Fred Kaplan has the details.

The cap­ture of Saddam Hussein dra­mat­i­cally illus­trates an ancient, but often for­got­ten, prin­ci­ple of war­fare: It’s easy to kill peo­ple but very hard to kill a per­son.
Saddam’s nab­bing took thou­sands of Army and special-​​ops forces, inter­ro­gat­ing hun­dreds of loy­al­ists, track­ing dozens of leads, and, in the end, one sol­dier spot­ting an out-​​of-​​place thread of fab­ric on what turned out to be a secret cover, then lift­ing the lid to find the Butcher of Baghdad him­self hid­ing in the bot­tom of a hole.
It was the work of armed troops on the ground, close-​​up, ulti­mately at arm’s length. It could not have been accom­plished by pilots drop­ping smart bombs from two miles high in the sky.

December 17th, 2003 | War Update | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.