First Iraq, Now Serbia
Despite almost three months of sustained bombing, the
Serbian mili
tary appear to have been relatively unaffected by the
air assault. Serb units withdrawing from Kosovo
offered little confirmation of the triumphant bombast
spewed forth daily by Pentagon spokesmen and Jamie
Shea, the Dr Goebbels of Brussels. Well shaved and
fed, in clean uniforms, they had plenty of fuel, and
moved with ease along a supposedly shattered road and
bridge network. Hardly the demeanor of an army
battered into submission by high assaults.
This is not to deny that the bombing campaign was
disastrous for the Serbian economy. Nato, conscious
that the vaunted precision systems are little of use
against a well dug in military, devoted the bulk of its
attention to civilian targets, notably electrical power
systems and the Danube bridges. While Milosevic
would probably have been able to continue his defiance
of Nato under these attacks, the fatal blow for him was
the loss of Russian support.
Such realities will have little effect on official postwar
analyses. Instead, key "lessons" of the war are being
eagerly retailed by the press, the most significant being
that the European air forces could make only marginal
contributions to the bombing campaign because they
lacked precision guided bombing systems and that
therefore they had better hurry up and buy some -
from the U.S. of course - so that they too can lay
waste irksome states at will.
On the face of it, once such delights as JDAMS
precision guided bombs (the kind that took out the
Chinese embassy) repose in their arsenals, the
Europeans will be able to attack civilians without fear
of casualties. Serbian air defenses, though they did
succeed in forcing Nato to bomb from 15,000 feet and
higher, managed to shoot down only two of the
attacking planes in the entire war. Such ratios,
according to friends of CounterPunch in the weapons
design community, are unlikely to last for ever.
Ever since the 1950s, the air defense sector has
whored after the false gods of radar guided missile
systems. In essence, these rely on a ground based radar
"illuminating" the target and then relaying information
on its position to the missile. This was the basis of the
Serb air defense network, equipped with Soviet
designed SAMs. Radar guided missiles are
unsatisfactory in many respects. Because they are
necessarily emitting information-the radar signals-the
ground based radars must inevitably advertise their
precise location, thus rendering themselves liable to
targeting and destruction by anti-radiation missiles,
launched from planes, which simply home in on the
source of the radar beam. Failing that, the signals can
be jammed. (It is true that that the Serbs did employ a
certain amount of cunning in the deployment of their
system, evading destruction by keeping the bulk of the
radars switched off, thus forcing Nato to take account
of the potential threat posed by these withheld assets
and exercise commensurate caution.) A further
disadvantage of radar guided missiles lies in their lack
of maneuverability. Ever since the Vietnam war, U.S.
pilots have been aware that these missiles, especially
large models designed for high altitude such as the
SAM-2 and the mobile SAM-6, are easily evaded since
they cannot follow a target in even a gentle turn.
Despite these proven drawbacks, the
weapons-producing countries of the developed world
(including the Russians) have shown little interest over
the past few decades in pursuing imaginative concepts
that can be effective against bomber attack. This is to
the obvious detriment of developing countries who,
since they are the designated targets, are the market for
such weapons. Sooner or later someone will realise that
there is a rich market waiting for anyone who finds a
more effective defense against the bombers.
An entirely feasible alternative approach lies in the
possibility of missiles with passive guidance systems.
These rely on the target itself advertising its location,
either by the heat emitted by its engines or the
radio/radar signals it necessarily broadcasts in order to
locate targets, communicate with other planes, or
identify itself as a "friendly" to the rest of the attacking
force. The U.S. Sidewinder missile, designed to used in
aerial combat, is a tremendously successful
heat-seeking missile and has spawned a host of
imitations. At one point the U.S. developed the
Chaparral system, essentially a ground fired
Sidewinder. This proved unsatisfactory as it was too
small to carry the propulsive power to propel it to the
height and speed of potential targets-a Sidewinder, after
all, is launched from aircraft flying at high speed in the
vicinity of the target. Ground based heat seeking
missiles such as the shoulder fired Soviet SAM-7 or the
famous Stinger are obviously too small to be of use
against anything but low flying targets.
Should anyone with the necessary resources apply
themselves to the task, it would be entirely possible to
develop a ground launched passive guidance missile
with a motor large enough to enable it to reach the
target. High speed should not be an essential
requirement, since any plane carrying bombs will
necessarily be traveling at sub-sonic speed. Of greater
importance would be a high degree of potential
maneuverability gained through a large wing area on
the missile. Ideally, such a missile would carry a dual
guidance head, both radar seeking for bringing it to the
area of the target and heat seeking for terminal
guidance.
The simplest and oldest means of shooting down a
plane are of course guns. Anti-aircraft gunfire is an
exercise in prediction, since the target is moving at
speed and will therefore have changed its position
relative to the gun from the time the bullet is fired to
when it arrives in the target area. Thus a hunter aiming
at a speeding pheasant "leads" the bird, ie aims just in
front of it. A target traveling in a straight line obviously
makes the job of prediction easier. Once the target
starts to maneuver away from a straight line, the
potential for the bullet to miss obviously increases.
Therefore the faster the bullet travels, the better chance
it has of hitting the plane-more precisely, if the flight
time of the bullet is halved, the miss distance will be
cut by a factor of four.
The speed of a bullet is determined by both its
aerodynamic properties and the explosive power of the
charge that propels it. Little constructive work has been
carried out in this area since World War II, and
certainly not by the Soviet designers who created much
of the weaponry presently deployed by developing
countries. The best on offer is probably the 35 mm
round developed by Oerlikon, the Swiss arms
manufacturer, which is effective past 10,000 feet.
Again, there is no inherent reason why high velocity
rounds with higher altitude range could not be
developed.
Lastly, it seems curious that a crucial component of the
Nato air offensive against Serbia was able to function
unchallenged. The Global Positioning System, a
network of 24 satellites orbiting 11,000 miles above the
earth, enables anyone with a receiver to fix their
position with great precision by triangulating their
location with radio signals transmitted from two or
more of the satellites. Nato bombers navigated by
means of GPS; the Cruise missiles that rained down on
Serbia were directed to their targets by GPS, as were
the JDAMS bombs employed in the mysterious strike
on the Chinese.
It should be a simple matter to jam the GPS radio
signals. Indeed a 1994 Rand Corporation study
conducted on behalf of the U.S. Air Force, with
distribution restricted to the military and defense
contractors, concluded that "an extremely low jamming
power of one watt will cause loss of code tracking" and
therefore "clearly the use of GPS for military
applications is extremely vulnerable..." Those engaged
in the attacks on civilian and diplomatic targets should
be thankful that the defenders did not have recourse to
this simple expedient. Future attackers may not enjoy
the same immunity.
Words that Stand the Test of
Time
Back in 1994, our friend Doug Lummis, who teaches
in Tokyo, wrote a prophetic attack on the International
Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. It
appeared in The Nation for September 26 of that year.
Pointing out the dubious legal standing of this body
conjured into being by the UN Security Council, Doug
reflected that the Hague-based Tribunal, not to be
confused with the World Court, would most likely be
"yet another instrument to bind new fetters on the
poor, and give new powers to the rich."
Then Lummis goes on: "It is a scandal in contemporary
international law, don't forget, that while wanton
destruction of towns, cities and villages' is a war crime
of long standing, the bombing of cities from airplanes
goes not only unpublished but virtually unaccused. Air
bombardment is state terrorism, the terrorism of the
rich. It has burned up and blasted apart more innocents
in the past six decades than have all the antistate
terrorists who ever lived. Something has benumbed our
consciousness against this reality. In the United States
we would not consider for the presidency a man who
had once thrown a bomb into a crowded restaurant,
but we are happy to elect a man who once dropped
bombs from airplanes that destroyed not only
restaurants but the buildings that contained them and
the neighborhoods that surround them."
On this very topic, we should add that a Spanish pilot
has charged that he and his fellow pilots were given
targeting orders by US officers, requiring them to bomb
civilian targets. In the Spanish periodical Articulo 20,
Captain Adolfo Luis Martin de la Hoz is quoted as
saying, on his return >from the bombing war, that
"Several times our colonel protested to NATO chiefs as
to why they select targets which are not military in
nature. They threw him out with curses, saying that we
should know that the North Americans would lodge a
complaint to the Spanish forces, both through Brussels
and to the Defense Minister. But there is more and I
want to disclose it to the world. Once there was a
coded order from the North American military that we
should drop anti-personnel bombs over Pristina and
Nis. The colonel refused this altogether and a couple of
days later the transfer order came."