Going to War - GPS Declassified: From Smart Bombs to Smartphones - page 111

and launch-warning satellites. Positioning satellites permitted U.S. troops on
the ground to use hand-held receiving devices to determine their exact posi-
tion without reference to any ground features.” 33 These wording choices sug-
gest careful editorial decisions recognizing the public's lack of familiarity with
gps. Two years later, a comprehensive and popular account of the war, Cru-
sade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War , by the Pulitzer Prize-winning
journalist Rick Atkinson, avoided the terms navstar , Global Positioning Sys-
tem , or gps . Its account of the by-then declassified calcm mission discusses
the arms control issues posed by replacing the nuclear warheads but omits any
mention of gps guidance. 34
Despite its complexity and the varied ways newspapers, television, and books
explained or worked around it, gps emerged from the war with much broader
name recognition. One other medium deserves mention—word of mouth.
More than 540,000 coalition troops from thirty-one countries discovered a
new battlefield dynamic as their units navigated aircraft to precise weapons
launch points or crossed vast expanses of featureless terrain in vehicles or on
foot. These troops witnessed the utility of gps and returned home after the
war to talk about their experiences. Many were probably the earliest adopters
of gps navigation devices over the following decade.
Consider this passage from the Gulf War Air Power Survey , describing how
gps improved the delivery of conventional weapons: “Although laser-guided
munitions constituted only 6.7 percent of bombs dropped from tactical aircraft
during Desert Storm, accurate bombing played a pivotal role in the exercise
of air power by Coalition and particularly U.S. air forces. The relatively low
percentage of precision-guided bombs reflects in part the fact that many of
the unguided bombs were dropped from 'smart' platforms (e.g., aircraft) that
were, at least in principle, capable of achieving near precision-guided muni-
tions accuracy with 'dumb' bombs.” 35
Despite media fascination with “smart” bombs, roughly 210,000 bombs
used during Desert Storm were unguided. 36 The U.S. military had installed
gps equipment in only about 300 aircraft before the war and sent some to the
theater outfitted with portable receivers. 37 About half of the 66 b- 52 bombers,
less than a third of the roughly 250 f-16 fighters, and a handful of the 82 f- 111
fighters were gps- equipped. 38 Commercial receivers were the only option for
coalition aircraft, so British pilots attached handheld gps units with Velcro to
the instrument panels of their Jaguar ighter-bombers. 39 Pilots also had to
ensure that their gps receivers and inertial navigation systems used the same