GRAPEVINE

By DAVID ELLIS

Pentagon officials, while delighted with the gulf-war performance of weapons like the F-18 Hornet and the Tomahawk cruise missile, have privately concluded that some other important systems were maddeningly unreliable. Secret Navy memos disclose that shipboard communications computers, the key link to General Norman Schwarzkopf's headquarters, were dangerously slow and out of date. Crucial orders from Riyadh were transmitted to some naval vessels at pokey telex speed, often arriving in more than 20 separate pieces and taking up to six hours to be completed. (Personal computers found in many homes can transmit data 10 to 20 times as fast.) The delays left pilots with little time to study their missions before taking to the air.

In a desperate effort to bypass the electronic logjam, officers from the U.S.S. Saratoga began running a 200-mile helicopter shuttle from their Red Sea position to Riyadh. There the day's orders were copied onto a floppy disk, flown back to the carrier, transferred to hard drive and distributed.

Even slower to arrive was crucial satellite photography for bomb-damage assessment. Aviators often wouldn't see the results of their bombing runs for several days, a problem that frequently led to overkill. Complained one classified cable to Washington: "Planners were often forced to plan without knowing if their primary target had already been destroyed. This resulted in more area saturation and less precision."

With reporting by Sidney Urquhart