One of our insider correspondents points out this AP photograph from Lebanon and raises a red flag:
I am not saying the description is false, but I spent 20 years in the Air Force, much of that time doing targeting and mission planning for aircrews which involved a lot of post-strike analysis. This is by far, the lease [sic] amount of damage from an “air strike” I have ever seen. Even a Hellfire missile does more damage than this, remember the Predator strike on the car of some Al Qaeda operatives some time back? Total destruction of a soft vehicle like this. The only damage, other than minor body damage, I see is a missing sun roof. Thought you might want to add it to your list of possible fakes.
While inconsistent with the effects of large munitions such as satellite– and laser-guided bombs and even, yes, Hellfire missiles, this damage might represent a lucky hit by a helicopter-fired unguided rocket or a cluster bomb … or something far more sophisticated.
Consider: The U.S. Air Force since the late 1990s has had a weapon that disperses guided submunitions (each packing the punch of a hand grenade), each bomb capable of taking out a company of tanks. It’s called the Sensor Fuzed Weapon. Globalsecurity.org explains:
The Sensor Fuzed Weapon [SFW] is an unpowered, top attack, wide area, cluster munition, designed to achieve multiple kills per aircraft pass against enemy armor and support vehicles. After release, the TMD opens and dispenses the ten submunitions which are parachute stabilized. Each of the 10 BLU-108/B submunitions contains four armor-penetrating projectiles with infrared sensors to detect armored targets.
Defense Industry Daily appropriately calls the SFW “cans of whup-ass”.
Israel is a known consumer of American Joint Direct Attack Munitions and a producer of laser-guided bombs. Has it gotten into the SFW game too, either with American weapons or its own similar design?
If so, I’m not surprised they’ve kept it under wraps. This is a cluster bomb we’re talking about, the kind of weapon notorious for accidentally taking out civilians who might be milling around the battlefield.
–David Axe
UPDATED, 8/11/06: A source from inside the aviation industry says the mystery munition might be a Viper Strike.
{ 15 comments… read them below or add one }
The damage is suspiciously light even for a bomblet. The windshield appears intact, for instance.
I think it’s obvious that the Israelis are dropping laser-guided, kinetic energy house bricks from specially designed fighter jets.
-oz
It’s an odd photo if the car was damaged by some kind of air-to-ground weapon. Also, where is the damage to the surrounding area from the rest of the bomblets if it was a cluster bomb? The road seems undamage. If the car was hit by a cluster bomb wouldn’t there be some holes in the pavement or at least some debris or shrapnel laying on the road? A cluster bomb seems like a wierd weapon choice for the Israelies who for the most part seem to be making precision strikes. My guess is the car was either dumped there for some reason, in an everyday auto-accident, or was just close enough to an explosion to be flipped over without being totally destroyed. I’d really like to see some more photos of the scene. Does anyone have the link to the AP’s description of the photograph? I could almost buy a hit by something like the an Apache’s 30mm cannon, but there’s no sign of any obvious entry holes for cannon shells or shrapnel.
David Axe,
you wrote “This is a cluster bomb we’re talking about … ” No, it’s a cluster bomb that you alone are talking about, which could not possibly have had anything to do with this vehicle, which has clearly just been run off the side of the road and abandoned. No penetrations, windshield intact, no road damage, no surrounding terrain damage … com’aaaawn, dude.
This is sooooo silly.
No weapon known to man could possibly tear a hole through the roof of a metal car while not so much as making a crack in the very fragile windshield.
Small pebbles falling off the backs of trucks crack windshields all the time, but we are supposed to believe that some weapon of war tears a square hole out of a roof, wrecks the interior and the doors, and yet won’t harm glass mere inches away.
My theory is that the roof of the car was removed manually, with something like a crowbar, and the person or people doing it might have been standing on the hood of the car when they did it, which explains the small dents in the hood. The car has obviously been stripped. For example, the headlights are both missing, not because of damage, but because they were removed by hand.
One more thing, if a SFW hit this car, which is on its face a ridiculous notion because a SFW is a very specialized weapon designed to be used on heavy armored concentrations, I could forsee one of two results:
1) The car would have a much smaller hole in the roof (and then the floor) and otherwise remain entirely functional, as the powerful but small penetrator would pass through the car quickly and nearly all the penetrator’s energy would end up in the ground beneath the car.
2) That the car would be a charred, twisted mess. This could easily happen if the penetrator caused spalling, throwing small fragments of white-hot metal into the seats, for example, starting a fire. Cars tend to be filled with flammable materials and will burn for quite some time, leaving a blackened frame behind.
“The car has obviously been stripped. For example, the headlights are both missing, not because of damage, but because they were removed by hand.”
No idea about cluster bombs or submunitions, so I’ll keep my trap shut on that one, and I think arguing about whether or not a given photo is faked just plays out as a bunch of ideological yammering from both sides, so no comments there either. (Besides that one.)
But I *do* know that if you are going to be sneaking around in your car, and not in a convoy, you’ll want to disable the lights.
Another, more likely possibility is that the car was just driving around partially stripped. Anyone who’s been in a “developing country” situation like southern Lebanon can tell you that’s not exactly uncommon.
Again, I am expressing no opinion about possible ordnance effects on the car, ’cause I don’t have one, or whether or not photos are being ‘faked’, because I don’t care.
That’s some pretty shoddy reporting work there, David.
Seriously, a cluster bomb? Are you honestly telling us that? My cousin drives a car in worse shape than that. Your politics are showing through, AGAIN.
If it was hit by a weapon and not just a junker that was in a road accident, my vote would be for a non-explosive guided bomb. A rock with fins, in other words. Such an object would go through the roof, hit the ground below, and bounce back up. If it were small and didn’t hit the gas tank that would be all you would see.
Cranky
Even a cluster munition would cause outward deflection of the metal, this vehicle looks like a roll over.
Also the windsheild is still in tact.
No shrapnel holes in the roof or heat/fire damage to the paint?
I wouldn
The BBC has a picture of an ambulance with curious hole in the roof, the result of an Israeli air strike.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_pictures/5245644.stm
re: the BBC pic of the ambulance…note that the hole in the ambulance is small, with a roughly circular shape, and visibly burned at the edges (paint charred). In addition, there is a clear pattern of shrapnel/blast damage radiating from the impact point. Compare this with the large, almost square hole in the car in the post, with curled edges and no visible charring/shrapnel.
One quick note: the picture caption, at least, says nothing about an air strike. It says the ambulance was ‘caught up in the violence.’ An antipersonnel cluster bomblet and a hand grenade aren’t noticeably different in many cases; this could have simply been a ground munition hitting the top of the ambulance – or, from the angle, a small mortar shell designed for fragmentation rather than penetration.
Man, I love to hear myself talk, don’t I? Sorry.
SFW would drop onto/into the hottest portion of the vehicle as it was designed to punch through the lighter armor above engine compartments of armored vehicles. This damage is something else.
D
Apparently, the fellow with 20 years experience has never seen the damgage done by a 40mm low velocity grenade on a civilian(japanese) automobile. Looks like it was fired from up on the hillside, from a trace line forward of the vehicle down on the vehicle, notice the secondary fragmentation pattern on the hood. Not everything that conks you on the head is dropped by an f-16.