Going to War - GPS Declassified: From Smart Bombs to Smartphones - page 108

an important role in Operation Desert Storm.” It provides no statistics but
instead offers this cautious appraisal: “A complete assessment of the agm-
86c's effectiveness is difficult to determine because of incomplete battle dam-
age assessment (bda) and the inability to distinguish damage caused by other
munitions that struck some of the same targets. All missiles launched success-
fully transitioned to cruise flight. Demonstrated accuracy appears consistent
with the results obtained from testing.” 20
In other words, to ensure success the military intentionally struck many tar-
gets repeatedly using a variety of bombs. The use of new gps- guided missiles
that were untested in battle would certainly have warranted such a strategy.
A major review, the Gulf War Air Power Survey , released in 1993 by an indepen-
dent, Air Force-appointed panel, was similarly cautious: “The calcm's high
explosive fragmentation warhead is designed to attack soft targets. Neverthe-
less, calcm was apparently effective in Desert Storm against electrical gen-
erator switching facilities and exposed communications relay facilities. In
contrast to tlam [Tomahawk land attack missile], generalizations concerning
calcm effectiveness in Desert Storm must be treated with caution in light of
the small number fired.”21 21
In any case, the thirty-ive calcms were sufficient to impress the Air Force
to order hundreds more, and today the missiles feature upgraded avionics with
multichannel gps receivers and three-thousand-pound bombs. 22
The tlam referenced in the survey is a tercom- guided, deep- strike weapon
the Navy launched from ships and submarines against heavily defended Iraqi
targets as far as seven hundred miles away. (It now has a listed maximum
range of one thousand miles and uses gps.) 23 The Navy fired 288 tlams dur-
ing the Persian Gulf War—116 during the first twenty-four hours and nearly
two-thirds of the total within the first forty-eight hours of the six-week air
campaign. 24 All but six achieved cruise flight. Footage of these twenty-foot-
long missiles riding fiery plumes from the decks of destroyers, sometimes
against a pitch-black sky or breaking the surface after a submarine launch,
were among the most vivid images televised during the war. They form a sort
of visual bookend with grainy, black-and-white videos of laser-guided mis-
siles (different weapons, not tlams) perfectly aligned in the crosshairs diving
into airshafts on rooftops. These images provided a televised, round-the-clock
public introduction to precision-guided weapons, or “smart bombs,” which
had been under development since the Vietnam War. However, war coverage
did not produce an equal public introduction to gps for a variety of reasons—