We received the following. Can't vouch for its content, but the forwarding source was impeccable.--RL By Michael Schrage Speaking at a national security event in Jerusalem four years ago, an American aerospace executive named James Roche half joked that there was a high-tech race between U.S. and Israeli pilots as to who would be indicted first for war crimes. Roche's provocative theory? In a battle, some of those pilots would be launching precision-guided ("smart") bombs at their targets; they might be dropping dumb bombs, too. The Geneva Conventions ostensibly require belligerents to take every possible precaution to minimize civilian casualties. So if an air force drops dumb bombs that might inadvertently kill civilians when it could have dropped smart bombs that probably would not, doesn't it leave itself open to accusations of war crimes? Today Roche is the secretary of the Air Force. And it would be hard to find anyone at the Pentagon or in Foggy Bottomwho would consider those remarks humorous now -- however prescient and cynical they were. Roche identified what are emerging as painful military, legal and public relations challenges to winning America's war on terror. These challenges pose awkward questions for the military, its lawyers and its civilian overseers. Why? Because our weaponry is becoming too smart for our own good. Our technological superiority is creating expectations among our allies and enemies that place unrealistic demands on how we deploy it. By most measures, America's high-tech armaments have performed superbly in Afghanistan. In April, in its preliminary review of the Afghan bombing campaign, the Pentagon found that more than three-fourths of U.S. bombs -- smart and dumb alike -- hit their intended targets. And the precision of the smart bombs (meaning bombs and missiles guided to their targets by lasers or satellites) was breathtaking. The Navy, for example, claimed a 90 percent target hit rate for its smart bombs. Should those estimates hold, the Afghanistan air offensive will define a level of accuracy never seen before in wartime. Compare those figures with the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the 1999 NATO-coordinated strikes against Yugoslavia, where fewer than half of all allied munitions hit their intended targets. Today's "smart" is a lot smarter than even a few years ago. Precision weapons are becoming not only more reliable, but faster and cheaper. And some old weapons are being retrofitted with global positioning system technology, boosting the IQ of even the dumbest bombs. These Joint Direct Attack Munitions, or JDAMS, have a procurement cost of only $20,000, compared with more than $1 million per cruise missile. The recent successes have bred a new conventional wisdom both inside the Pentagon and out: If smart bombs are good, smarter bombs are better. Greater precision means greater mission effectiveness and a reduced risk of collateral damage. This sounds terrific, but it's not. Those assumptions create a dangerous trap. There's no doubt that more precision can increase military effectiveness, but even the most brilliant technological breakthroughs pass the point of diminishing returns. I would argue that America's overwhelming superiority in military technology will actually undermine our ability to prosecute a war successfully. That's because, ironically, our promises of precision will increasingly be turned against us, providing incentives for our enemies to mix military targets with civilian populations and making us more vulnerable to misleading or deceptive intelligence. Moreover, those promises give rise to foolish expectations: If America's weapons are so superb, the accidental destruction of innocents must represent a contempt for human life and be attributable to willful negligence rather than the fog of war. The problems with precision get worse: U.S. technology is so superior to the rest of the world's -- America's defense R&D budget is larger than Europe's and Asia's combined -- that it becomes easy to imagine America's more sensitive allies, and perhaps even an international court, arguing that we are ethically, if not legally, obligated to make our smart weaponry even more discriminating. For example, a soldier laser-guiding a bomb to a targeted convoy might be able to disarm the bomb in flight if he sees too many women and children in the convoy. But even if smart bombs were every bit as smart as the pilots or special forces operatives who launch them, they would still require precise targets, which require precise intelligence. And precise intelligence is a scarce commodity in the war on terror. "A smart bomb is only as accurate as the information which has led to its targeting," British Air Vice Marshal Tony Mason told the BBC during the recent Afghan campaign. "We have the very, very obvious example in Kosovo, the tragic example where an [American] B-2 bomber from a height of probably 35,000 feet placed three -- not one or two, but three -- bombs accurately, in bad weather at night into the wing of one building. Unfortunately it was the Chinese Embassy." Delivering smart munitions to precisely the wrong targets is the kind of disaster that America's enemies have every reason tofoment. Our military mistakes are their propaganda victories. This country's technological edge also creates perverse incentives for enemies to use noncombatants as hostages and exploit America's precision weaponry for their own ends. "If killing civilians can complicate a democracy's war effort, then those intent upon waging neo-absolutist war will not hesitate to induce 'collateral damage' situations," observed Col. Charles J. Dunlap Jr., an Air Force judge advocate general, in a 1997 article for Parameters, the U.S. Army War College Quarterly. "Precision weapons will be no panacea in a high-tech war. Critical supply facilities as well as those communications nodes that can't be miniaturized and dispersed may be buried below POW camps, schools, hospitals and similar facilities." In other words, a logical enemy response to America's precision weaponry is to hide in plain sight: Place that command and control center in the pediatric wing of a downtown hospital; billet the general staff in a town's day care center or its holiest shrine or mosque; have troop transports interspersed with school buses -- and put troops in the buses with the children. You think your weapons are so smart? Take your best shot. As one Army general told me, "These thugs want to show the world that it's the Americans who are killing their people. They want to create their own little My Lai for propaganda purposes. They want to exploit our conscience because they have none." Such deliberate blurring of civilian and military targets is, of course, a grotesque violation of the laws of war. That legal fact is seldom discussed publicly by human rights advocates or, surprisingly, by either the Pentagon or the State Department. That's a strategic opportunity missed. Here's why: Just as technological innovation consistently makes obsolete key aspects of financial regulation and intellectual property law worldwide, it will force fundamental reexamination of the laws of war. As the undisputed leader in military technology, the United States has every incentive to ensure that its technical supremacy doesn't devolve into a legal liability. While there are no good answers to the political and public relations predicaments posed by precision weaponry, there may be answers that aren't half bad. The first is straightforward: Washington must publicly disavow the explicit targeting of noncombatants in any bombing campaigns. The era of World War II, Dresden-style "area bombing" is over. At the same time, however, the United States should work with other countries to have nation-states that improperly commingle legitimate military targets with civilian populations declared in violation of international law. A next step would be for the United States to develop notification protocols to alert foreign civilian populations to likely military targets near them. Perhaps all the cell phones in a given geographical area would receive a message warning of an impending strike, for instance. Or a disposable drone might drop pamphlets explaining evacuation options.Ideally, notification would be coordinated with the United Nations, Red Cross or other humanitarian groups, which would share some responsibility. Military commanders now have extraordinary latitude in determining what kind of civilian notifications -- if any -- are appropriate, according to a Defense Department spokesman. But a little standardization could go a long way here. Depending on the mission, the military element of surprise might be traded off against the benefit of public notification to minimize civilian deaths. Once a system of civilian notification is in place, regimes that turn their own citizens into hostages would find it more difficult to win propaganda wars. And civilians who exploit the notification system to aid the enemy should lose their legal status as noncombatants. Managed well, notification would confer military benefits as well as war crimes protections. Observing how populations respond -- if at all - to notification protocols should yield useful intelligence for future targeting. Since the end of World War II, America has invested hundreds of billions of dollars in weapons of mass destruction that it has never had to deploy. Since the end of the Vietnam War, it has spent hundreds of billions on weapons of most precision. Those smart weapons represent a triumph of technology. The surest way to facilitate their future success is to remember that precision is a means to an end and not an end in itself. The best way to preserve the effectiveness of smart weapons is to become smarter about using them. Michael Schrage is a senior adviser to the Security Studies program at MIT and a pro bono consultant to various branches of the Defense Department. Back to 2nd Quarter 2002 List of News Items Back to Master List of News Items Back to Master Magazine List © Copyright 2002 by Coalition Web, Inc. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com