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American Morning

America Strikes Back: Inside Look at War on Terrorism from the Air

Aired October 10, 2001 - 10:50   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: A lot of talk about this war against terrorism being an unconventional one. But at least in its early stages, this air war against targets in Afghanistan looks a lot like previous ones. Some of it is, well, almost paint by numbers if you will.

Joining to talk a little bit more about the first stages of any war is retired General Don Shepperd. He has a lot of experience in fighters, and can give us a sense of what the first targets might be.

In this case, you go after the things that might should you out of the sky. I guess that should be obvious.

GEN. DON SHEPPERD, (RET.) CNN MILITARY ANALYST: That's right, miles, the integrated air-defense system is what you are after in the beginning.

O'BRIEN: Let's do a sort of an a, b, c. This is not a how to, if you will. We don't want to do that kind of thing. But we want to give you a general sense of some of the principles involved in any early stages of any air campaign. Take a look at what's going on potentially in a situation like this. We have highlighted Kabul in Afghanistan. And let's bring you down a little closer and give you a sense. Early-warning radar and F-16 or F-15 coming in. Give us a sense of that.

SHEPPERD: Well, basically what happens here is the early-warning radar is the first thing to pick up aircraft approaching the country. They put out energy. It's reflected back to the site. They start to know that an airplane is coming, not much information yet.

O'BRIEN: All right, and then the next step, once that early- warning radar in play, what happens next?

SHEPPERD: Through landlines, the early-warning radar will tell the missile site to begin tracking, and aim their tracking radar in the vicinity of the airplanes. They then track it, and they also turn on the red here, which is a missile-tracking radar before they fire the missile itself.

O'BRIEN: So, so far, there are three radar devices involved, so far.

Next step in this process, the firing of a surface-to-air missile. What happens then?

SHEPPERD: In this case, the surface-to-air missile is fired at the airplane. You can see it fired and you watch it tracking at you, and gets pretty exciting in the cockpit at this time.

O'BRIEN: What are you hearing in the cockpit?

SHEPPERD: You are hearing a radar-warning receiver that tells you what's coming and where it's coming from. You turn on your own electronic-jamming pod. You throw out chaff. The whole idea is to decoy the missile toward the chaff and then stay away from missile, which has a warhead that can explode on proximity within about 300 feet.

O'BRIEN: All then, that black cloud we saw was chaff. It's just aluminum particles...

SHEPPERD: Aluminum particles.

O'BRIEN: ... send a surface-to-air missile astray.

SHEPPERD: Exactly, the missiles homes on the chaff instead of our airplanes.

O'BRIEN: Pulling a few Gs in a maneuver like this.

SHEPPERD: Indeed.

O'BRIEN: All right, let's go the next step here now. Now this a more coordinated approach to the whole thing. We sort of gave you a hypothetical, which isn't really true to form, because you're not talking about one aircraft. It's different.

SHEPPERD: Right, a lot more airplanes involved, and by the way, you could have several early-warning sites and three or four missiles shooting at you the same time. All of these are radiating. Now an electronic-jamming aircraft shows up and starts to jams the radars. The radar operators are now confused. Bad things showing up on their scope, their trying to work through it. And the next thing that happens is the following airplane shows up, and this is what we call a SEED, a suppression (UNINTELLIGIBLE) air defense airplanes, and he fires a radar homing missile, a high-speed antiradiation missile that homes in on the radar to take out the missile sites.

O'BRIEN: All right, so the issue here is you have a jamming plane. This is your primary, I guess, decoy plane, because it would get things going in some sense, right? Not really, this is not a decoy necessarily . It's an airplane that's trying to get to a target while these people are trying to prevent him from it.

SHEPPERD: All right, great. That's General Don Shepperd, giving us a sense of how these sorts of situations occur.

Let's take a quick look at some of the bomb damage assessment photos, if you will. That's what they call them, and those give you a sense of some of the targets. First of all, surface-to-air missile installation, this is typical layout here, isn't it?

You see those spokes that coming out of there. These are typically guns that are protecting it, correct?

O'BRIEN: This is SA-3 site. In the middle, the large thing is the radar, the low-blow radar. The three sites are the missiles, on transporters, erectors, launchers or tells. Each one of them has three missiles on there. The heart is the circle there, which is the radar. You want to take it out first, then the missiles.

All right, let's see the after picture and we'll give you a sense of what happened.

Looks like a successful one, doesn't it?

SHEPPERD: Yes, looks to me like it's all like all blown away. Probably one B-2 sortie targeting on all four of those intended points of impact.

O'BRIEN: Once those radar sites, those surface-to-air missile sites are down, you are able to engage in other targets, and of course chief among them airfields.

SHEPPERD: Exactly.

O'BRIEN: Give us a sense of the airfields that they would have gone after, and exactly -- this is typical airfield here. This particular one is in Shindand, and take a look at these craters here. And it Doesn't look like damage from here, but this is going to will shutdown this airfield, isn't it?

SHEPPERD: It really is. What you've got here, this is south of Herat, and basically the airfield there, the impacts are designed to keep airplanes from being able to taxi to, or land on, or operating from the runway. They can be repaired fairly quickly, so that we can take the airfield and operate from it, or it can be rebuilt for humanitarian purposes or the use of the Afghan people after the war.

O'BRIEN: So far, general, this has the feel of the early days of the air war over the Gulf. Things are going to start to change rapidly, aren't they.

SHEPPERD: It's a microcosm of the Gulf. Next perhaps comes some ground operations that we've been talking about early this morning.

O'BRIEN: But that's where things will depart from what we're familiar with, if you're using the Gulf as an example.

SHEPPERD: Exactly.

O'BRIEN: So far, when you say, the Pentagon says "air superiority," what does really mean?

SHEPPERD: People get the idea that air superiority, nothing will happen anymore in the air. What it means is you can operate around- the-clock, both day and night, and it's still very dangerous. A missile can show up at anytime, and you want to stay at high altitude, out of the guns, out of the shoulder-fired missiles, so it's still a sky in Afghanistan, even though we can operate at will, anytime of the day or night we wish.

O'BRIEN: All right, some important context and depth here.

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