|| -----Original Message-----
|| From:Michael Pollak
||
||
|| On Sat, Dec 7, Stephen Fidler in the FT was quoted as saying:
||
|| > But the predominance is also qualitative. Some 95 per cent of the
|| > bombs dropped by the US in Afghanistan were precision weapons,
||
|| Is that true? I thought the tide-turning weapons in this war
|| were carpet
|| bombing (or "stick laying") B-52s dropping daisy cutters and
|| 2000lb bombs,
|| a technology that hasn't changed in 30 years. (Although it works a lot
|| better against massed troops defending cities with zero anti-aircraft
|| weapons than it does against dispersed guerrillas in the jungle.)
||
|| Michael
||
No, the new US air-land tactics are as follows: Local fighters to secure an area for US forward spotters equipped with a GPS device that can beam its data directly to the JDAM units strapped on the B-52's bombs. When the spotter finds a target, he ranges it with a laser rangefinder and punches in the GPS coordinates. The B-52's bombs then glide in, guided by the JDAM unit, to a target area measured in tens of yards (I forget the actual number). Frequently a JDAM unit has dud batteries and the bomb falls without guidance - sometimes on civilians and sometimes on "our" guys - because a Boeing subcontractor was being greedy: http://www.cbsnews.com/now/story/0,1597,320425-412,00.shtml --------------------- Peoples used to work at Eagle-Picher Technologies in Joplin, Mo. The plant makes sophisticated batteries that power the guidance systems inside virtually all of America's precision guided weapons.
"It's very possible that these failures, and it's very likely these failures are happening because of the batteries," Peoples said.
Due to production and testing problems at the plant, Peoples said, some were duds. Others exploded. Many developed cracks and should have been discarded, costing the company hundreds of thousands of dollars.
But employees tell us after-hours - with government inspectors gone - that they were ordered to seal the cracks with an unapproved material called loctite.
"And Eagle Picher did this not on hundreds, not on thousands, but on millions of batteries that they sold," Peoples said. ---------------------
Please note that I'm not saying 1000s of civilians died because of battery failure.
Hakki