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American Morning

America Strikes Back: Look at Smart Weapons

Aired October 10, 2001 - 11:49   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: We are doing the best we can to give people a sense of, when we say a smart weapon, it is a term we bandy about, and I think it's something we seldom explain, what we mean by a smart weapon. And here to make us smart, as we continue this process, is General Don Shepherd, our military analyst, back once again, to give us some insights into the world of smart weaponry.

I read an interesting statistic a little while ago. It said that in World War II, it took about 650 bombs to take out a target, Vietnam about 170. Now it's perhaps four smart weapons. That's an amazing statistic.

GEN. DON SHEPPARD, (RET.) CNN MILITARY ANALYST: Even more than that, it used to be bombs per target. It's now targets per bomber. One bomber can do the work on several targets and he'll hit them.

O'BRIEN: All right, let's go through some of the scenarios on smart weaponry, and take a look at the first one. We'll put this one on the board. This is just a basic illustration of how heat-seeking missiles operate, and this is really come niece play in Afghanistan, doesn't it?

SHEPPARD: It really does. Heat seeking is semismart. It homes in on the heat from the engines of an airplane, and basically it can be fired from the ground. A lot of them are shoulder fired, which are called man pads, man portable air-defense systems, and they're very dangerous, especially the helicopters, or any low-flying airplane, range of about a mile, mile and a half, round in there.

O'BRIEN: These stinger missiles which you've been talking about, heat seekers, and what is the countermeasure for a...

SHEPPARD: Basically, you dump flares out the back of the aircraft and the missile, hopefully, homes on the flares as opposed to you?

O'BRIEN: All right, this needs seems to be repeating. Hopefully, we'll get the next one to come on up here in just a second. Let's see if we can have that happen. There it is.

Now we are talking about J-DAN, which is yet another acronym for us, but this is a bomb that is normally dumb, but has gone to college, if you will, and it has a pack in the tail, which allows it to receive information from a satellite known as global positioning system. How does it work?

SHEPPARD: Basically, what you do is you program targets into the bomb. And By the way, in some airplanes, you can change these coordinates in route. It's important you have accurate coordinates. Those coordinates are updated by the constellation of global position system satellites. It homes on the coordinates that you have programmed in, and it works its own fines in the back of the bomb there to home in on the targets. It's important to have the right ones.

O'BRIEN: All right, so basically, using the information from the GPS, it guides itself to a fixed longitude and latitude coordinate, and presumably strikes its target.

All right, let's go to the next scenario. Now we took a little bit of artistic license here. First of all, that's an F-15. F-15s have not come into play yet in this air battle over Afghanistan. F- 14s have. That sort of looks similar to an F-14. F-14s now have an attack mode where they actually drop some bombs. Laser guidance is what we are talking about here, a weapon that is fired off, and some aircraft, and once again, a little more artistic license. This is an A-6, not in play here in this role.

But nevertheless, the idea here is to point a laser beam at the target. What does that do, general?

SHEPPARD: Basically, the laser beam reflects from the target and the weapon homes in with a sensor on the front of the weapon on that a laser beam. These are laser guided bombs. And CNN is being very responsible to show concepts and not tactics, not even the correct airplanes in many cases. I really do like the way you are going about presenting this.

O'BRIEN: All right, well, we do appreciate that. And of course, the laser can be pointed from the actual aircraft, which did the firing as well. There are some advantages to doing it either way, I suppose.

SHEPPARD: Yes, one problem with laser is you have you to have the right weather conditions, so weather can become a factor. It can be done from other airplanes, or from your own airplanes, or people on the ground.

O'BRIEN: All right, people on the ground, and this is the scenario we see, and presumably, that brings the missile to its target. And like we way, if it's foggy, if it's dusty, it it's cloudy, this is not as good. And the GPS scenario we talked about just a moment ago is preferable for bad weather.

SHEPPARD: Correct.

O'BRIEN: All right, let's go to our final scenario here. Cruise missile, and what we have done here is we have given you a sense of some of the information that is plugged into the brain of a cruise missile. It actually sees contours, doesn't it? SHEPPARD: Yes, that's one way. It has three methods of navigation. INS, or internal navigation, and what you're showing here is terrain matching, if you will. It -- you program that in, and then it matches what it sees with the radar in the cruise missile to what it's flying over, and then finally, it also has scene matching at the end, where it uses photographs, so if has three methods, and if one fails, two of the others can take over.

O'BRIEN: So it literally can identify the distinct nature of that series of peaks outlined there. Now a lot of them now have GPS as well, have that satellite capability. So does this become less important, having this, or do they prefer all three?

SHEPPARD: They prefer to have all of them, and there are various versions of this, and the more systems they have, the more expensive. So we can do it all, but basically, we'd like to have as many options as possible.

O'BRIEN: Quick overall question for you, is this overly sold by the Pentagon, too much hype involved with these smart weapons, or are they for real?

SHEPPARD: They're for real. Now we used to have, if you go back to the Gulf War, it looked like we were dropping all precision-guided munitions, really only about 5 percent of munitions, been increasing every since, 60 percent in Kosovo. And now you'll see this scenario probably 90 percent smart weapons. They hit the target, that's the difference.

O'BRIEN: The days of carpet bombing with dumb bombs are pretty much over.

SHEPPARD: Well, if you have long targets where you want to destroy a whole complex like we saw yesterday in these training camps, then the dumb bombs are very useful.

O'BRIEN: All right, General Don Sheppard, as always, thanks as always for your insights. We appreciate it. Yet another tutorial for you.

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