Going to War - GPS Declassified: From Smart Bombs to Smartphones - page 104

the nonstop thirty-ive-hour round trip. After flying seven thousand miles in
fourteen and a half hours, refueling twice along the way, the planes reached
designated positions over northwestern Saudi Arabia, where their crews initi-
ated the first combat use of new gps-guided cruise missiles that had been in
development since 1986. The planes carried thirty-nine missiles—most of the
existing stock remaining after tests consumed eleven of the original ifty-seven
missiles the Air Force had ordered. 3 Four of the missiles on the planes experi-
enced software problems and were not launched. The remaining thirty-ive
missiles were launched at eight targets across Iraq, from Mosul in the north to
Basra in the south. The target list, comprising power plants, electric transmis-
sion facilities, and military communications hubs, reflected a strategy of swiftly
knocking out Iraq's air defense system and rendering Iraqi command and con-
trol “deaf, dumb and blind.” 4
The flight home proved more difficult than the attack phase. Struggling with
bad weather, stronger than expected headwinds, engine and radio problems,
and the drag of unlaunched missiles, the b-52 pilots had to refuel more often,
and the return to Barksdale took more than twenty hours. When they finally
touched down the pilots hurriedly taxied the planes into their hangars to keep
the unused weapons out of sight. 5 This historic combat mission, the first one
launched in Operation Desert Storm (though not the first to fire weapons, as
attack aircraft already in theater began bombing two hours before the b- 52s
arrived), was the one the public would learn about last in a war that unfolded
with unprecedented visibility on the cnn cable news channel. Operation Senior
Surprise remained secret until January 16, 1992, exactly one year later. 6
GPS Enters Guided Weaponry
The extra secrecy before and after the mission arose from the missile's origin
and warhead, in addition to its guidance system. Development began after the
Air Force accidentally hit the French embassy in Libya with an errant bomb
and lost an f-111 fighter and its crew during Operation El Dorado Canyon, an
April 1986 raid on Libyan military facilities and terrorist training camps. The
Air Force sought a precision weapon that its pilots could launch from safer dis-
tances and chose to modify its only standoff weapon, the nuclear-tipped agm-
86b air-launched cruise missile (alcm). Bomb makers replaced the agm- 86b's
nuclear warhead with a one-thousand-pound conventional bomb and adapted
its inertial navigation system for guidance using a gps receiver in place of the
existing terrain contour matching (tercom) system. tercom uses onboard