Precision Bombing?

[Tourmeister]

Howdy,

:tab I get a kick out of the media reporting how a bomb nailed a building but not the building next door. It almost seems like they think a 2000 lb bomb blows up the building it hits and doesn't do any collateral damage to the surrounding buildings! The shockwave alone will blow out windows in surrounding buildings. Don't get me wrong, this is still better than the bomb missing completely and landing on the adjacent building. But are they really that clueless?

:tab Anyway, just an observation.

[hillcountry]

I don't think they're clueless. I think that they think WE are all clueless! If you figure that probably 25% of Americans don't care about the war (sad but it's probably higher than that) and 25% of Americans can see through their reports (sadder...probably lower than that), that leaves 50% of the population (an awfully lot of people) to hold captive with their banter. They are just going for marketshare. I can't say that I blame them (I can just choose not to watch them).

[max955]

Amen! The innane nature of most of what has been coming out of the reporters' mouths lately (aside from the reporters actually embedded with operational units) just turns me off. It really drives home the fact that these people make their living off of thinking up things to say, and when there's nothing worth saying they still have to come up with something.

[scratch]

Yesterday, I read an article that put a lot of issues in perspective.

A military analyst was quoted as saying that a single 2,000 lb. smart bomb or Tomahawk missile is the equivalent of a 1,000 plane B-17 armada from the WWII era. The reason being, that 60 years ago they could only count on 50% of their simple gravity bombs hitting within 2,300 feet of the intended target. To get to the high-90's probability of hitting the target that they needed explains the huge, dangerous and very destructive bombing missions sent out over Nazi Germany and Japan - and gives some idea of the amazing effectiveness of the weapons we have today.

Think of the civilian casualties that would occur without our advanced weaponry; think of the cost in manpower and equipment that is being saved. The 300,000 thousand allied soldiers now in Iraq along with their aircraft, tanks, etc. are a far more formidable fighting force than everything America had in WWII, yet they can be applied with either unprecedented subtlety or ferocity as conditions and strategy dictate.

This doesn't mean things will be a cakewalk, especially if our troops end up having to fight from door-to-door inside Baghdad, but victory is assured for our side so long as we don't lose the will to continue. Furthermore, when this is over with, the great majority of civilian causalities will have been a direct result of the decisions Saddam Hussein and his generals made. Too bad that most of the reporters and news services covering this war seem to be too dense to understand any of this.

[Tourmeister]

:tab I have a WWII Military Aviation History book that deals specifically with the bombing campaigns. The wildest thing in the whole book are some recon photos after bombing raids that show the bomb dispersal over a target area. Overlaid on the picture are concentric circles representing radii of 1/2 mile, 1 mile, 1-1/2 mile, etc,... out to about 5 miles or so. Only something on the order of a few percent of the bombs actually landed in the circle of 1/2 mile radius. So aiming for a particular building was not even a remote possibility. Of course, those bombers had NAZI fighters all over them until they got into the FLAK zones over the targets. Our guys have been dropping a lot of the bombs in standoff mode without any real fear of being shot at by enemy fighters.

:tab Still though, the accuracy is amazing! But I recall a while after the Desert Storm, it finally was acknowledged that smart bombs were only a small fraction of the total number of bombs dropped. Also, many of them missed. But they did not show those on CNN ;-) Similar stuff happened with the Patriots. They were claimed as 100% accurate and then later it came out that they pretty much missed almost every target they shot at :eek Makes me wonder about the "reporting" of this war :-|