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CNN Live At Daybreak

America's New War: Military Ethics in Bombing

Aired September 20, 2001 - 07:18   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.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: Right now we're going to go back to Atlanta and Miles O'Brien, who has some detailed information on where in the world the U.S. aircraft may be deployed in this war -- Miles.

MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Paula, we're also going to bring in an expert and talk about the limits of the efficacy of any sort of bombing activity or perhaps cruise missiles when the enemy in this case are terrorists who perhaps are living in tents or maybe caves.

Let's turn it over now to General Donald Shepperd, who's a retired air force general who joins us from Washington. General, good to have you with us again.

MAJOR GENERAL DONALD SHEPPERD, FORMER NATIONAL GUARD COMMANDER: Good morning, Miles.

O'BRIEN: All right, let's first of all talk in general about the efficiency of bombing when the targets are these small bands of terrorists. It seems to me an awful lot of expensive weaponry could go to making holes in the ground if you weren't very careful about it.

SHEPPERD: You've got to be very careful about it, very wise. The purpose is not to drop bombs and certainly not to drop bombs on innocent civilians. We don't want them to know what they're after, but if you have any military force they have to have gasoline, they have to have ammunition, they have to have command posts and communications. It's very difficult to root out small groups.

We're after a lot more than that and everybody thinks about Afghanistan, and we may interested in a lot of other places, as well, at the same time.

O'BRIEN: All right, let's talk a little bit about this latest deployment which is in the news this morning. I've got a scenario here and I want to just talk it over with you as we go through it. Let's take a look at the 3D animation of what we have, what we've put together this morning.

Now we know that 100 aircraft are apparently on their way to the Gulf region. As we move in on Saudi Arabia, we take a hypothetical bombing run, which is really hypothetical. This is the Prince Sultan Air Base and an F15 is depicted here.

The problem that you immediately see, General, as you lift off and go across the Gulf is that you're in Iranian air space. That's a very unlikely scenario, isn't it?

SHEPPERD: It's unlikely but I'm sure that the diplomats are hard at work on getting access to that Iranian air space. If you came out of the Gulf region, you would want to go across Iran because that's your shortest route. We also have the capability to go around and come up from beneath. We also, don't forget, have the capability to strike from the United States if we need to with things such as the B2, the B52 and the B1 bomber. We've got the capability to do it all.

O'BRIEN: All right, now that Gulf bombing run that we just depicted is a long one. It's perhaps as long as 1,300 or 1,400 miles one way, so the round trip is a very long run, indeed, would require a couple of air refueling stops, I imagine, to do it properly, correct?

SHEPPERD: That's correct. You'd tank up going in and you'd probably tank up coming out as well. Basically, these are long missions. You can see fighter missions as long as five to eight hours round trip. But our folks have done that before. We practice it on a regular basis and our military, our air force knows how to do it.

O'BRIEN: All right, let's go to the other scenario which we worked up this morning and that is an aircraft carrier stage mission. We're in the Arabian Sea now and we know the Enterprise is there, the aircraft carrier. The Carl Vincent may possibly be moving in that direction out of the Gulf. In this case the one way trip to Kabul is about 700 or 800 miles, a little bit easier. The air space over which you might have to refuel would be Pakistani. Is that a more plausible scenario in your mind, general?

SHEPPERD: It's not any more plausible because it's shorter but also because it's my understanding that the Pakis have opened up their air space to us. They haven't opened up their bases. I'm sure diplomatically we would also like to have access to bases. But the scenario from the south is much shorter and therefore you'd like to have short routes as much as possible.

O'BRIEN: General, I've got to ask you a general question here. Our producer at the Pentagon, Chris Plante (ph), yesterday said a good analogy on this is trying to bomb, going after these terrorists with bombing runs would be like trying to bomb Los Angeles to get rid of the drug dealers. Is that a good analogy?

SHEPPERD: It's an analogy. I'm not sure it's a good one. We're going to be very careful. We've got our intelligence people at work, our military intelligence people. We've got our diplomats at work. What we're after is the people who did this and the people that support them. We made it very clear we're not only coming after the terrorists, but anyone that supports them, including groups and also including nations out there.

We've got to be very careful drawing these analogies because they're not always true.

O'BRIEN: How difficult will it be to identify targets?

SHEPPERD: It's going to be pretty difficult, but remember, we now have a lot of precision guided weapons. Before, we dropped a lot of bombs because we didn't have the capability to hit pinpoint targets. We've now got a lot of weapons that can hit pinpoint targets and again, we can do it from fighters, we can do it from bombers, we can do it from in close and we can do it from far away.

Our military capabilities are tremendously increased from the Gulf War.

O'BRIEN: General, a lot of people would suggest this is not an ideal air campaign, that this is something that might have to be fought on the ground, maybe with special forces. I know you're an old blue suiter and I say that, I don't mean to call you old, but a retired blue suiter. Do you think that that is accurate to say?

SHEPPERD: You're right in both cases. Special operations are going to play a big part in anything that we do out there. And we've got this full gamut, Miles, all the way from these special operations that come in silently and quietly in small teams at night, that type of thing, all the way to the big stick of bombers and, of course, aircraft carriers and our army. We want to be very careful about putting people on the ground anywhere. It's very likely to me that we will do it through the air scenario.

Now, a couple of other things I wanted to mention to us is there's two big messages that America is very serious. One of them is when you start to deploy forces and the other is when you call up your Guard and your reserve. And, of course, when you delay the redeployment of aircraft carriers. All of those things are being done. This is serious stuff.

O'BRIEN: General Donald Shepperd, retired, with the U.S. Air Force. Thanks for your insights once again. We'll check in with you a little bit later if you don't mind.

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