Team assessing bombing targets

  • Published
  • By Capt. Patricia Lang
  • Combined Weapons Effectiveness Assessment Team Public Affairs
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AFPN) --  On June 15, the Combined Weapons Effectiveness Assessment Team visited a site targeted by coalition aircraft during Operation Iraqi Freedom. A bunker was buried underneath layers of soil and concrete, hiding more than 25 compartments used to shield parts of Saddam Hussein's regime.

In the next several weeks, the team will visit several hundred sites to assess the accuracy and precision of weapons used by coalition aircraft during the operation and will report its findings to U.S. Central Command this fall.

The bunker was targeted April 1. It was hit by global position system-guided bombs in two specific places, while a neighboring smaller bunker was hit once. The goal was to eliminate the regime's command and control, said Maj. Craig Baker, a CWEAT team member and U.S. Air Force Weapons School instructor who specializes in hard-target penetration.

The targeting challenge, said Baker, was to select the right weapon with the right fuzing, or time-delayed explosion, to make it through those layers of concrete, many of which were supported with 1-inch steel reinforcing bars.

Team members acknowledge the bunker design was innovative. From the top, it would appear to hide six to eight gymnasium-sized rooms. But inside, tunnels connected much smaller rooms separated by thick, metal blast doors.

Instead of using dozens of bombs to entirely destroy the bunker, air component officials selected a few precision-guided weapons to achieve specific effects, Baker said. In World War II, annihilation was often the focus, but for OIF, effects-based targeting guided air actions.

“Why destroy everything, when to achieve your objective you just need to create certain effects?” asked Baker.

A B-2 Spirit flying tens of thousands of feet overhead dropped one 2,000-pound and one 5,000-pound precision-guided bomb on the large bunker. As the on-scene assessment confirmed, the bombs arrived at the exact coordinates they were programmed to hit.

One bomb was intended to seal off access to the bunker. A cylindrical dirt hole revealed the bomb's path to the 8-foot-wide entry; it had lost its heavy concrete roofing. Still the entry may have remained passable. The other was meant to penetrate to the ground floor of the bunker. It did; yet with the bunker's extreme compartmentalization, the intended blast and fragmentation was limited.

These preliminary findings are what CWEAT calls "site observations." After the team measures and records data, as they did June 15, analysts compare whether the weapons achieved their intended effects.