Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins by Andrew Cockburn Page B

objects that were not there—as those identified with plain eyesight. The implications were very clear: electronic imaging does not depict battlefield reality with the same acuity as the human eye, an essential truth long forgotten by the time the U.S. military and CIA began watching the world via drone-fed video imagery, with tragic consequences for many a false target.
    Graduating with a masters in operations research and mathematical statistics, Sprey worked full-time at Grumman for two years until, in 1966, he moved on to the Pentagon as a member of the “whiz kids,” an iconoclastic team of analysts recruited by Defense Secretary McNamara to bring a fresh look to military thinking. Before long, the young mathematician had earned the wrath of air force generals with a study demonstrating that their plan to fight the Soviets in Europe with long-range bombing was essentially worthless and that the only effective use of airpower was in close support of ground forces on the battlefield. Faced with the political necessity of fending off the army’s bid for the close-support mission and the money that went with it, the chief of staff, a devious bureaucratic politician named John McConnell, detailed Sprey, despite the repugnance of his views on air power, to come up with the basic design for a close-support plane that would underbid the army’s helicopter candidate.
    Endowed with this high-level support, Sprey conceived a design that enabled pilots to operate low and close to the battlefield (thanks to the plane’s maneuverability and multiple safety features) and thus be in a position to see and judge for themselves what course of action to take. This was a very far cry from the sensor-dependent concepts underpinning the revolution in military affairs, but faced with the threat from the army, the air force went ahead and put the plane into production.
    Like all new systems, the A-10, which first flew in 1975, was officially justified by the perennial Soviet threat, which would be confronted in a mighty clash on the plains of Europe sometime in the future. In reality, an actual Soviet invasion of Western Europe seemed highly unlikely (though Andrew Marshall proposed in the 1980s that a weakening USSR might “lash out,” thereby generating a billion-dollar nuclear shelter scheme). Then, to everyone’s complete surprise, opportunity knocked for a real live demonstration of what the post-Vietnam high-technology military could do, and under near-perfect conditions.
    Within a few days of Iraq dictator Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, U.S. Central Command forces had been rushed to Saudi Arabia to prepare the counterattack. Following in their wake came the air force’s Deputy Director for Strategy, Doctrine, and War-Fighting, Colonel John Warden, complete with a plan for the air force to win the war on its own. Warden, deeply immersed in the subject of bombing, had long ruminated on the theory that identifying and destroying a limited number of specific “centers of gravity” essential to the functioning of an enemy society would lead inescapably to the enemy’s collapse or paralysis.
    This was not a new idea; the air force had maintained for years that the destruction of “critical nodes” would ensure such an outcome. The problem had always been how to identify these critical targets, let alone put them out of action. Repeatedly, during bombing campaigns, assaults on supposedly crucial nodes tended to yield minimal effects, so new nodes were designated and targeted. In World War II, for example, ball-bearing plants were succeeded by rail networks, which were followed by oil refineries. None of them brought about the anticipated enemy collapse. In addition, a recurring consequence of these campaigns had been an eventual broadening of target categories, so that in the end, everything got hit. As we shall see, this syndrome applies even when the targets are individual humans rather than things.
    Warden