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Peace at any cost is a Prelude to War!
Admiral confirms Iraq-bombing problem
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
A senior admiral yesterday defended the performance of a Navy "standoff"
weapon unleashed against Iraq on Feb. 16, saying an inaccurate weather
forecast prevented the munition from making a late-course correction and
directly hitting all targets. Top Stories
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"The mission itself was a very effective mission," said Vice Adm. Dennis
V. McGinn while giving the Navy's first public explanation of why the Joint
Standoff Weapon (JSOW) did not hit the bull's-eye on all targets during the
recent air strikes on Iraq. "It's an absolutely superb weapon. It has a
tremendously good record in combat."
Adm. McGinn, deputy chief of naval operations for naval warfare, said in
an interview that three factors combined in what he termed an "anomaly" to
prevent most JSOWs from making a direct hit. Still, since the type of JSOW
used in the operation was a cluster munition, most air-defense targets were
damaged by a spray of bomblets, he said.
The former carrier pilot said forecasters failed to predict the force
and direction of winds at the point the JSOWs glided toward Iraq's early
warning radar. The weapon's onboard program to compensate for changes in wind
direction was insufficient to overcome the wrong data. Because of this, the
center of the pattern of bomblets did not explode on target.
Since then, he said, technicians have reprogrammed the weapons to be
able to adapt to faulty weather predictions.
The 1,500-pound JSOW, as a standoff system, allows pilots to release the
munition at a safe distance from thick air-defense barrages. An unpowered
JSOW can travel 40 miles; a rocket-propelled model can go about 120 miles.
Adm. McGinn explained the problem:
"What happened was a combination of a difference between predicted and
actual winds in the target area, the mission planning profile that was chosen
based on that prediction and the way in which the weapon itself calculates
wind in the target area. Those all combined in an anomalous way that we had
not seen before in the various successful missions that it had been employed
in in the past. And it caused a less-than optimum positioning of that bomblet
centroid in relation to the targets. Not in all the JSOW weapons, but in
most."
The weapon's performance has been under attack in the media after
reports that Navy F-18 pilots from the carrier Harry S. Truman missed half of
their targets. That characterization, Adm. McGinn contended, is incorrect.
"In many cases, those bomblets actually damaged or destroyed the
intended targets," he said. "The centroid of the pattern of bomblets was not
precisely where it should have been because of this wind anomaly. And that is
the fix that is already out in the fleet right now."
Adm. McGinn declined to say how many JSOWs were launched.
President Bush approved a Pentagon request to bomb about 20
communication and radar sites south and north of Baghdad. Iraq was using the
powerful radar to spot U.S. and British warplanes entering a no-fly zone
south of the 33rd parallel and passing the information to air-defense
batteries trying to shoot down the aircraft.
"The weapon performance, not because of a technical issue of the weapon,
but more because of this anomaly of using a backup mode to calculate wind in
the target area, wasn't what it had been in previous uses in combat," Adm.
McGinn said. "It had practically a 100 percent record."
He described the fix as changing "the way in which the mission planning
software is used. . . . It wasn't an inherent design problem in the weapon. .
. . It's a relatively straightforward fix."
The standoff system used on Feb. 16 relied on satellite guidance via the
global-positioning system (GPS). Adm. McGinn said the GPS component performed
as expected.
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