Excerpt from SF Chronicle 2/10/03, followed by my letter to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Military Develops Loitering Weapons
by Jim Krane, AP
NEW YORK — They loiter. They sleep. They hide. And when an enemy sticks his neck out, they kill.
The Department of Defense is preparing new weapons that can loiter over a battlefield or sneak into enemy territory and “sleep” until an appropriate military target blunders into their sights.
Some weapons … are mere concepts and may never be produced. Others, like Lockheed Martin’s 5-foot-long Loitering Attack Missile, are already being produced.
The idea, developers and contractors say, is that the best way to hit an elusive target is to hide a weapon inside enemy territory ahead of time.
In the Gulf War, U.S. forces were unable to find and strike a single Iraqi mobile Scud missile launcher, a failure that has catalyzed a slew of new military technology aimed at narrowing the … delay between spotting and destroying a target.
Loitering weapons are “the next big step in combat effectiveness,” said Glenn Buchan, a RAND expert in unmanned aerial vehicles and satellites. …
The Lockheed missile, for example, sprouts wings and fins and flies to a map coordinate, then can wander above the area for 45 minutes, directing a laser-radar seeker to search the ground for a target to destroy, said Steve Altman, development manager at Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control in Dallas.
If a tank or mobile artillery battery were detected on a hillside, the LAM could be dispatched to search the whole hill until it found and destroyed it, Altman said. …
…
Lockheed hopes to deliver the missile to the Army in time to be part of its Future Combat System, a new generation of battle vehicles expected to go into service in 2008, Altman said.
The LAM’s 45 minutes of loiter time doesn’t allow it the patience of an unmanned aerial vehicle, which can hover over a battlefield for hours, waiting for a target. UAVs armed with air-to-ground missiles have already killed people targeted by U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Yemen.
For the next generation of UAVs, the Pentagon wants still longer dwell time so they can “sit above an area for a very long time, to track a small band of terrorists or watch for an armored column,” said Michele Flourney, a senior advisor at Center for Strategic and International Studies.
…
Sleeping weapons under consideration by the Air Force would, ironically, spend most of their time on the ground. … The sensor bombs would be dropped … onto enemy territory and would hide until detecting a target and being commanded to destroy it. One version under consideration wakes up, pops open and fires a missile, said Steve Butler, engineering director at the Air Armaments Center at Eglin Air Force Base…
Letter to Editor
Date: Mon, 10 Feb 2003 10:02:18 -0800
To: letters@sfchronicle.com
From: Jeff Johnson
Subject: Letter to Editor
Editor,
The article “Military Develops Loitering Weapons” [2/10/03] exhibited a disturbing lack of critical balance.
First of all, “loitering weapons”, which “wait for the enemy to come to them” are nothing new. The best-known loitering weapon is the land mine. We all know how effective they are… at killing and maiming innocent farmers and children, even for decades after wars end.
The article claims that “loitering weapons” can “‘sleep’ until an appropriate military target blunders into their sites.” Or a friendly troop carrier, or a farmer’s wagon, or a child.
The article reports that unmanned aerial drones “killed people targeted by U.S. forces in Afghanistan…” Yes: such as three non-combatant Afghan villagers, including Daraz “tall man” Khan, who were blown to bits by a Hellfire missile fired from a Predator drone while collecting scrap metal in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan [see "Fallout Over Errant Missile", SF Chronicle, 2/17/02].
Military planners want a silver bullet that magically kills only bad guys. They want it so much that they are easily duped by defense vendors into buying bogus technology… with our money. Then, when “loitering” and autonomous weapons inevitably cause unwanted civilian or “friendly” casualties, the people who deployed the weapons duck responsibility, calling the victims “inevitable collateral damage”.
If you put weapons out there and they kill innocent people, you are responsible.
Sincerely,
Jeff Johnson
