Stardate 20030403.0026

(On Screen): Glenn Reynolds links to some rather remarkable satellite photos of Iraq, which show rather graphically just how good our targeting has been. There are a lot of sites we've hit, but all of them are surrounded by housing which appears untouched. That kind of accuracy is stunning. Even though I know how it's done, it's still stunning.

One of the pictures is of an airport there, and the main airstrip and the taxiway are both pocked with craters. (I've extracted out part of it and done some processing on it to make it more clear.) (Update: actually, they probably are not craters. See below.)

With damage like that, it can't be used. But the damage isn't actually all that severe, and after the war it won't be too hard to repair it.

Nonetheless, the pattern of it is rather distinctive on the larger photograph; it looks as if something painted a very long and narrow stretch of ground with a whole lot of tiny bombs. I think I know how that happened.

There's a special system which was designed in the last twenty years which does exactly that. One version of it gets carried beneath a jet, and the jet will make a low swoop over an enemy airfield (about 50 feet up) and fly the length of the airstrip. When the pilot triggers the payload, it starts a process of ejecting bomblets, gradually releasing them over a period of a couple of seconds. They're usually a mix; most of them are actually bombs intended to crater the airfield, but it's also common to mix some mines in so as to dissuade those on the ground from trying to fix it, or to slow them down in their efforts to do so.

It's impressive as hell to watch. I saw film of it on some show on the Discovery Channel, years ago. But I don't remember what the thing is named, or anything else about it. In operation, it produces exactly the kind of damage pattern we see in the photograph above: a long, narrow strip consisting of a log of very small craters.

I seriously doubt we were willing to send a jet in that low, and the unit I'm describing can't be used from high altitude. However, I remember hearing that there's another version of the same thing which is designed to be carried by the Tomahawk cruise missile. A Tomahawk is capable of making such a pass along the length of an airstrip )or part of it), and can be programmed to fly away afterwards and to crash somewhere else.

The Navy's info page on the Tomahawk mentions that one of the things it can carry is a "conventional submunitions dispenser with combined effect bomblets" but I don't know if that's the same thing.

I know that some of my readers are far more versed in these kinds of things that I am; anyone got non-classified information they can share? (I don't want to hear any secrets.)