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CNN Saturday Morning News

A View of the Military Technology at America's Disposal

Aired October 13, 2001 - 11:27   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.
JEANNE MESERVE, CNN ANCHOR: All morning we've been looking at the dramatic improvement the U.S. military has made in it's weapons systems since the Gulf War but we just got a grim reminder that all weapons are not perfect. This hour Kyra Phillips is taking a look at collateral damage -- it's a sad reality of warfare no matter how careful the U.S. military is. Kyra -- to you.

KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Jeanne, thank you so much. And I immediately want to bring in our CNN Military Analyst General Don Shepperd to talk about this.

Now, General, before we get into talking about collateral damage and what happened in Kabul, pilots are -- they don't drop a bomb until they know their target, correct?

MAJ. GEN. DON SHEPPERD (RET.), CNN MILITARY ANALYST: That's right.

PHILLIPS: I mean, they're actually sure of it?

SHEPPERD: They know what target they're after and they are sure of their target before they drop -- that's the whole idea although this is the law of unintended consequences. When the dogs of war are unleashed the law of unintended consequences takes over; and terrible things happen in war. And they happen to civilians as well as the military, Kyra.

PHILLIPS: The price everyone pays for freedom.

SHEPPERD: Indeed.

PHILLIPS: All right, we're going to go right to a graph and sort of talk about what happened here.

SHEPPERD: All right.

PHILLIPS: OK? And what it looks like. Now...

SHEPPERD: Well, we're running this and let's take an F-18, for instance. And, for instance, what's happening here is this F-18 is -- let's say he's designating this target. That is the building he wants to hit, which is a military target. And you can notice that the bomb has gone astray and caused damage in three other areas. That is what we call collateral damage. Numerous things can cause this. It can be human error. It can be operator error in the cockpit. It can be that the guidance system on the weapon failed. It can be satellite failure. It could be that a fin drops off the bomb. These things happen in war. Again, we do not intentionally target civilians. We want them to hit that target right there and look what this weapon hit. All sorts of things can cause it.

Now there's ways that you can keep this from happening. All of these targets -- we select our run-in headings carefully. Notice we selected our run-in heading here so that we would not hit these things over here we didn't want to hit.

The -- we run that through a computer and we select the type of bomb. Now let's say this is the target that we wanted not to hit right there and this is the target we wanted to hit. All right, we run a computer model, we drop a bomb and let's say this is the fragmentation pattern of the bomb. You notice it's going to hit this target that we don't want to hit so we throw that bomb away.

Let's put the target in again -- or the target in again right here. And this is the building we do not want to hit. Now we've changed the fusing of the bomb and the bomb goes deeper as opposed to instantaneous and the frag pattern is like this. It does not hit this target on the left that we don't want to hit.

One other way we can do it is this is...

PHILLIPS: And this is all to avoid instantaneous fuse?

SHEPPERD: This is also to avoid instantaneous fuse -- the last one here.

This is the target we want to hit. And now we select a different type of bomb -- a smaller bomb, if you will, and it throws a smaller fragmentation pattern. And, again, you do not hit the target you don't want to hit.

So we're very careful about this. But, again, in wartime operator error -- in this case that I'm hearing right now it sounds to me like something happened to the guidance system after the weapon was released but it's way too early to tell. We'll take the cockpit tapes and we'll investigate this just like we do an accident to try to find out what went wrong to keep it from happening again.

PHILLIPS: So if it looks like it was a guidance system error that means it had to be a laser-guided bomb, right?

SHEPPERD: No, it could be a laser -guided bomb or it could be a satellite-guided bomb. So, again, it could be the wrong coordinates typed in, the wrong coordinates given or it could be just a malfunction of the guidance system after it was released.

PHILLIPS: So it could be wrong coordinates if you're dealing with an LGB? SHEPPERD: It could be the wrong coordinates. An LGB is a Laser- Guided Bomb, so no. But if it's a JDAM, a Joint Direct Attack Munition...

PHILLIPS: OK.

SHEPPERD: ... it could be wrong coordinates there -- either way.

PHILLIPS: I'm trying to...

SHEPPERD: We go to great -- remember during the Gulf War a Tomahawk missile was going in. It was shot at by the Iraqi military. A wing was knocked off, if you will, and that missile veered into the hotel with the journalists. The one target in all of Baghdad for sure you didn't want to hit is the one with the journalists there, and it accidentally happened.

This is war and it's terrible. When you see the pictures of those kids, we all just grieve.

PHILLIPS: General Don Shepperd thank you so much once again. And for more on the military operations in Afghanistan -- also a complete list of the most wanted terrorists, you can click on to CNN.com, AOL keyword CNN.

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