Collateral Considerations
On avoiding and managing a reality of war.

By Charles E. Miller, a retired Air Force colonel.
October 15, 2001 9:10 a.m.

ollateral damage" is a cold, impersonal term for breaking things and killing people that you did not mean to break of kill. The U.S. goes to extraordinary lengths to avoid collateral damage. When innocent people are killed or injured in battle, it is not the result of a premeditated act by the U.S. military — and the tentative coalition suffers when collateral damage occurs.

In the current situation, the Taliban and bin Laden make some amount of propaganda hay when collateral damage occurs. This impacts military operations, which become more closely controlled. Some targets or target classes are passed by the planners or the shooters. Extra passes (fly-bys) are taken to guarantee target identification. Additional intelligence resources are assigned to improve target nomination and identification. On the ground, forces crawl closer.

There are now two stories on the cable networks about civilian deaths from air strikes. In one, the story is that a Navy fighter dropped a bomb aimed at a helicopter sitting at Kabul's airport, but the bomb went astray by about a mile and reportedly killed four Afghans. According to unidentified government sources, it missed because the coordinates for the target were misprogrammed into the bomb — there was a typo. The bomb was guided by global positioning satellites (GPS) to a precisely predetermined, exactly wrong place.

This is an example of the fog of war. The U.S. admits and regrets the error and has provided a logical and truthful explanation. It does not relish its error and glory in the loss of life. No obfuscation, no word games — even at the risk of unsettling the antiterrorism coalition. You can count on the fact that an extra, extra set of eyes will check the bomb coordinates from now on.

The other story centers on a Taliban-arranged tour of the village of Karam in eastern Afghanistan, supposedly struck on October 11. There are claims of 200 deaths. Pictures show a "bombed out" village, many dead livestock, a hospital with wounded people, and about 18 graves. There is also a picture of what appears to be a bomb casing — reported to be unexploded — with several "officials" examining it. The other 180 graves are reported to be further away in the mountains.

The facts are still one-sided and we know that the U.S. government will have to address the allegations. The U.S. is in a psychological war with a sophisticated manipulator of the media; it is not too difficult to imagine that the whole affair was staged, or at least important parts of it enhanced for television. We, of course, have the Taliban's word that this was not a training camp and that the area did not supported al Qaeda or Taliban operations. In any case, the U.S. did not purposely pick out a remote village of innocents to target.

The Campaign Shifts
There is a clear shift in one portion of the military campaign, President Bush has announced. The U.S. is now aiming its lethal armory of modern weapons at a different set of targets — ones that have a more direct bearing on the battlefield. Taliban troop concentrations, garrisons, and supply facilities, have increasingly appeared on the reported target lists, with artillery and tank locations being added as well. Soon we will see reports of convoys and other moving targets being attacked. Satellite-guided weapons, designed to strike-fixed location targets, increasingly will be replaced with weapons such as Maverick missiles that lock onto the infrared signature of the selected target.

Target identification will become more difficult — the shooters will be working from 15,000 feet or higher, or they will be in a hurry because they are operating from lower altitudes within range of anti-aircraft guns and shoulder-fired missiles. Attack helicopters are generally the delivery platform of choice for such low-level fighting, along with Air Force A-10 ground attack aircraft. The fixed wing A-10 (a large, "ugly" aircraft nick-named Warthog by its pilots) requires the same kind of airbases as other fighter aircraft and would have to operate from fairly near by.

Correction & Addendum
In my recent article concerning air superiority, I indirectly, and incorrectly, suggested that the 5,000-pound "bunker buster" bombs were being dropped on fielded troops. These bombs, originally developed during the Gulf War to attack well-built aircraft shelters, have been improved to be used to attack more deeply buried targets — such as command centers and bomb shelters for senior leaders. In that article, I also failed to mention that as air superiority is achieved, air forces begin to operate around the clock. The sustained air campaign keeps continuous pressure on enemy leaders, gets well inside their decision and reaction cycles, and makes it increasingly difficult to move their high-value items (say troops and tanks) away from where they think there will be attacks in the coming night. Such movement actually invites attack during the daylight.