The results of the Persian Gulf showdown, when they finally come in, will fuel an old quarrel over the virtues of high tech versus low tech, especially if some smart weapons turn out to be duds. But that debate may miss the point. The fact is that future weapons will have to be high tech to survive. The real question is, just how high tech - and what kind of weapons? For planners and policymakers, the issue is whether to build ever more sophisticated airplanes and tanks - “manned platforms,” in the military jargon - or whether to build better unmanned weapons to do the job instead. The choice is between evolution and revolution.
The most revolutionary weapon to land on Saddam is the cruise missile. In Baghdad, one Western correspondent watched in awe as a Tomahawk passed overhead, seemed to pause for a moment-and turned left, toward the Ministry of Defense. Who needs pilots when, missiles have minds of their own? Yet the workhorse of the war so far is a plane that began rolling off the assembly line back when American cars had fins. The B-52 has unloaded more bombs on the Iraqi forces than any warplane in the allied arsenal. The old plane is a model of the evolutionary approach. It has been rebuilt and reequipped a half-dozen times over the past three decades to run missions at night and through bad weather. In all, the apparent success of American weaponry in the gulf still owes more to slow and often painful trial and error than any sudden breakthrough. Most of the technology is vintage 1970s. Kennedy-era airframes like the F-4 and F-111 have been stuffed full of high-tech gear - microprocessors, laser guiding devices, electromagnetic jammers, infrared sensors.
Inside the so-called Iron Triangle - the Pentagon, Congress and the defense industry - tech can almost never be too high. The military has spent billions perfecting “stealth” technology to allow airplanes to slip past enemy defenses. Already the Pentagon is using the performance of the F-117A Stealth fighter in the gulf to seek congressional support for the B-2 Stealth bomber, endangered on Capitol Hill by its high price tag (at least $850 million apiece). The F-117A Stealth fighter has been a success - but in a more specialized role than the Pentagon acknowledges. The Stealth does not pack much punch. Yet because it is invisible to enemy radar, it can loiter over the target. In the gulf, the F-117A has been used mostly as a spotter plane, circling on high, training a laser “designator” on the target. Old-fashioned conventional aircraft - like the F-15, F-111 and Tornado - swoop in behind to actually deliver the bombs. It is a case study of how new high tech can be combined with old tech to get the job done.
The Pentagon would like to build a whole new generation of aircraft with truly revolutionary technology. Although Defense Secretary Dick Cheney canceled the Navy’s A-12 after massive cost overruns, the Navy will undoubtedly need to build a new attack plane to replace the aging A-6. The Air Force, meanwhile, forges ahead with the ATF - Advanced Tactical Fighter. The ATF will not only be stealthy, it will be equipped with ever more sophisticated computers to help the pilot fly the plane - and, if need be, fly it for him. The Air Force is experimenting with a Virtual Reality Helmet that projects a cartoonlike image of the battlefield for the pilot, with flashing symbols for enemy planes, and a yellow-brick road leading right to the target. Additionally, if the “Gs” from the tight-turning, fast-climbing plane make the pilot pass out, then a new computer, delicately called the pilot’s associate, would take over.
So why have pilots at all? Why not just build a plane that delivers weapons by remote control? There are, in fact, such planes on the drawing boards. Their backers call them RPVs - “remotely piloted vehicles.” Pilots, who do not want to be put out of business, call them “drones” (as in “dull” or “stupid”). The Air Force has been slow to develop drones for anything more ambitious than target practice.
Parochialism aside, there are other real problems in designing weapons that find targets without human guidance. It is one thing for an infrared - heat seeking - missile to pick a target out of the cold clear sky, but quite another to spot one on the warm and cluttered ground. Development of these “brilliant” weapons takes years of trial and error. The Pentagon is still struggling to perfect a radar-guided, “fire and forget” missile called the AMRAAM that has been in development for more than a decade.
The greatest obstacle to the high-tech revolution is money. As the costs of these weapons soar (the B-2 costs roughly 10 times as much as the old B-62), the resources available to the Pentagon will shrink, especially if the American economy remains shaky. Some defense experts, like Armed Services Committee chairman Sam Nunn, argue that the United States should continue to produce tried-and-true planes, but arm them with ever-smarter munitions, which are far cheaper to build than airplanes. The old planes need not be able to penetrate right to the target. The idea is to launch bombs and missiles from “platforms” that would “stand off” out of the range of enemy fighters and antiaircraft. The old could be married to the new: a B-52, for instance, can launch a cruise missile.
Americans have always looked to science for their answers, in war as in everything else. The H-bomb was supposed to make war too awful to contemplate, and Star Wars was intended to make it impossible to win. Now science seeks to leave the fighting to machines. It is unlikely that high technology will ever entirely remove men from the loop, however - nor should it. War is too unpredictable to be left to Dr. Strangelove’s computer. Yet the promise of high-tech warfare still beckons: to slowly move men farther and farther from the killing fields.
A combination of design and materials (mainly graphite composites) makes manned flights invisible to enemy radar. Already used in the F-117A fighter and the B-2 bomber; planned for the Advanced Tactical Fighter.
The Army’s tactical missile system can fire 75 miles. Could be loaded with smart bombs to seek out individual tanks.
The Air Force is experimenting with headgear that would project images of the battlefield for a pilot, with a yellow path leading to the target.
A dinosaur. Future “land combat vehicles” will fire ultra-high-velocity electric guns, and deflect enemy shells with an electromagnetic force field.
Air-cushioned landing craft allows the Marines to refight the battles of World War 11, but hit the beaches at 50 mph.
A very old airframe stuffed with new electronics. Can take tremendous stress from high-speed, low-level flight, while hunting enemy radar with homing and jamming pods and air-to-ground missiles.
