Navy bomb largely a $300,000-apiece bust in Iraq raid
By Lisa Hoffman, Scripps Howard News Service
WASHINGTON -- The Navy considers them "brilliant" bombs, but they behaved
anything but in last week's air attack on Iraqi targets.
Pentagon sources privately confirmed Thursday that one of the Navy's most-prized weapons
-- a satellite-guided bomb that costs about $300,000 --
was largely a bust during last Friday's bombing of radar and communications sites near
Baghdad.
Of the unspecified number of "Joint Stand-Off Weapon" bombs lobbed at the
military sites, more than half appear to have missed their mark, according to preliminary
damage assessments. Many veered far to the left of their targets, as much as 150 yards in
some cases, Defense Department
officials said.
That represents a significant failure of high-tech bombs that are supposed to be so
precise they can hit a target dead on even when fired from as far
away as 40 miles.
Publicly, the Pentagon would not confirm the apparent failure of what the Navy called
"revolutionary" munitions when they premiered to great fanfare and success in
Operation Desert Fox in 1999, the last time America pounded Iraqi sites.
They also were used against Serbian targets later that year. In those two instances, the
66 "stand-off" bombs racked up a 100 percent hit rate.
Spokesman Adm. Craig Quigley said overall performance of the raid this time was effective.
But he obliquely acknowledged some failure occurred. "Did each weapon perform
perfectly during the strike? No, it did not," Quigley said. "It wasn't perfect,
but we are on balance overall satisfied with it."
In Friday's raid, Navy F/A-18 strike jets from the aircraft carrier Harry S Truman in the
Persian Gulf blasted about 25 target points north of Iraq's
southern "no-fly" zone in response to Iraq's menacing acts toward patrolling
U.S. warplanes.
Along with the stand-off, or AGM-154A, bombs, American forces also fired AGM-130 guided
missiles and Stand-Off Land Attack Missiles, both of which performed well, sources said.
Each "stand-off" bomb, developed by Raytheon/Texas Instruments, weighs about
1,000 pounds; each F/A-18 can carry four of the 15-foot munitions at a time. The bombs,
guided by a global positioning and inertial navigation system, can be pinpoint-accurate.
When the Pentagon bought the bombs, they came with a 20-year, "bumper-to-bumper"
warranty from Raytheon. The contractor promised to cover all labor and materials costs
stemming from all failures pegged to hardware or computer software. Excluded from the
deal, however, were problems caused by "government mishandling" and "acts
of God."
The foul-ups last week led experts to speculate some sort of software glitch was to blame,
but a host of other problems also could be at fault.