The Air War: How Targets Are Chosen

By Bruce W. Nelan

The Stealth fighter-bombers located their target in the 4 a.m. darkness over Baghdad. Their laser-guided, 2,000-lb. bombs hit their mark with pinpoint accuracy. They cut through 12 ft. of reinforced concrete and exploded, peeling away the protective cover and destroying the bunker.

It was a perfect example of the kind of precise, high-technology air war the allies have conducted against Iraq. It was also a tragedy: the bunker was filled with Iraqi civilians who had taken refuge there from nighttime raids on the capital. But U.S. officials insisted that there had been no mistake and the bunker was, in fact, a military communications center. "From the military point of view, nothing went wrong," said Brigadier General Richard Neal, the briefing officer in Saudi Arabia. "The target was hit as designated."

In recent wars most civilian casualties have come among those who have had the misfortune to live near military installations and to be hit by badly aimed bombs. That has probably occurred in Baghdad as well, but not this time. The dispute here is whether the bunker was an ordinary civilian bomb shelter, as the Iraqis insist, or a former shelter recently converted to military use, as the U.S. command maintains.

American officers say flatly they do not target civilian buildings. This is something they have stressed since the war began, and the overall allied commander, General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, contends that his pilots take additional risks to avoid hitting civilians. Pilots approach targets closer than might otherwise be the case, flying lower and slower. They take extra time on the bombing run, which means they are more vulnerable to Iraqi missiles.

The intelligence analysis U.S. officials offered last week to buttress their case reveals a great deal about the painstaking methods they use in the air war in the gulf. Preparations for the strike on the bunker began months before the bombs actually fell. The CIA, for example, interviewed contractors and workers, including Koreans and Pakistanis, who constructed the bunker and about 20 others like it in Baghdad during the Iran-Iraq war.

Satellite photographs of the building showed at least two additions: a newly hardened roof and communications equipment that was protected against the electromagnetic effects of nuclear blasts. The satellites also snapped pictures of military vehicles parked outside and men in uniform entering and exiting the building. A wire-mesh fence surrounded the bunker; its roof had been painted with camouflage and fake bomb holes.

The clincher came last month, when U.S. intelligence satellites picked up radio transmissions from the bunker, sending orders to Iraqi military units in the Kuwait theater of operations. Missing from the accumulated evidence were any photos of civilians entering the bunker at night in search of safety. American officers say they assumed that civilians were being kept out because it was a military security area and the wire-mesh fence was there for that purpose.

This particular bunker became a target because of the effectiveness of earlier U.S. attacks on Baghdad. In the opening days of the war, the allies' strategic objective was to "decapitate" the Iraqi armed forces, to cut Saddam Hussein and his top officers off from the army in the south. Bombing raids were mounted to destroy command headquarters and military communications centers in the heart of the capital. As these were knocked out, the task of coordinating the armed forces was decentralized to secondary posts in the suburbs -- like the one hit last week.

Weeks before the war began, the U.S. Central Command had compiled a priority list of targets. At the top, along with command-and-control facilities, were military production centers, power and water supplies, and bridges and roads leading south to Kuwait. Most of those have been destroyed. The main bombing wave is moving south, onto the Iraqi army that is dug in facing Saudi Arabia.

Attacking a tank in the desert is far less ambiguous than picking out one building in a crowded neighborhood for demolition. The campaign against Iraq's dug-in divisions is a textbook exercise in air warfare: hundreds of planes are in the sky every day, with F-15s flying a protective patrol high above, while attack planes blast away at tanks, artillery pieces and ammunition dumps below.

Fighter-bomber pilots have divided the battlefield into small, lettered squares on the map called "killing zones." Working their way across the desert, sector by sector, spotters direct strike planes onto specific targets on the ground. Electronic-warfare planes black out ground-based Iraqi radar, as airborne tankers circle lazily to refuel the fighters that line up behind them. The whole armada is choreographed by controllers in AWACs radar planes, who see everything in the air for more than 200 miles in any direction. The Iraqis in Kuwait, says Captain Jessie Morimoto, a U.S. Air Force intelligence officer, have "stopped operating as a national army. What they're doing now is trying to defend themselves as people."

These direct attacks on Iraqi forces have already destroyed as much as a third of their armor and artillery. Warfare will never be foolproof, and air power alone has yet to win a war. But once the ground attack begins, allied pilots will learn soon enough whether their efforts have greatly improved the chances for a swift breakthrough.

With reporting by William Dowell/Dhahran and Bruce van Voorst/Washington