Word: targetedly
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...JDAM is designed to land within 43 feet of its target 50% of the time, but an Air Force general who helped run the war in Afghanistan boasts that the system performed even better there. Bombs fell within 10 ft. of their target "nearly 100% of the time," he says. Even if an enemy jams the weak GPS signal, the JDAM remains relatively accurate, usually landing within 100 ft. of its target. Accuracy is critical because a top priority in a new war against Iraq would be to cause as few civilian casualties as possible; accidents would be well covered...
JDAMs help protect pilots too. Unlike laser-guided bombs, which are guided to their target from planes flying at about 15,000 ft., JDAMs can be dropped from 35,000 ft., beyond the reach of much enemy fire. They can be unloaded 15 miles from their target, offering pilots additional protection. Plus, the bomb kits are user friendly. "It takes me about an hour's work to launch a cruise missile but only 10 minutes to launch a JDAM," says Lieut. Colonel James Dunn, a B-52 bombardier at Louisiana's Barksdale Air Force Base who lobbed the bombs...
...only a few guided missiles and accurate bombs at a time. Now virtually the entire armada of U.S. warplanes can dispatch such weapons. For the first time ever, a war can begin with one side able to wipe out, with near impunity, every key enemy building and other fixed target its intelligence has identified. Instead of F-117s buzzing Baghdad with a measly pair of 2,000-lb. laser-guided bombs, as in the 1991 war, the next conflict might start with B-2s over Iraq, each dropping 16 of the 2,000-lb. JDAMs. They would probably be followed...
...Gulf War, notes U.S. Central Command chief Tommy Franks, "we used 10 airframes to a target. Now we assign two targets to an aircraft." The improved efficiency would probably make a new air war in Iraq shorter than the Gulf War's 38 days. Because the JDAM could so effectively cripple Iraq's military, senior Pentagon officials believe the U.S. could topple Saddam with a maximum of 250,000 troops, less than half the number it massed to drive his forces from Kuwait in 1991. The weapon's precision should minimize damage to civilian structures, making post-Saddam Iraq easier...
...Iraq war. Thus the Boeing factory outside St. Louis is producing 2,000 kits monthly, and will soon increase production. McPeak says the biggest problem is that intelligence has not kept pace with the precision of the system. Too often JDAMs hit the right coordinates but the wrong targets. That happened in the system's debut during the 1999 Kosovo campaign, when a B-2 dropped three JDAMs on the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. The U.S. bombed the site thinking it was a Yugoslav military office building. Similar debacles have occurred in Afghanistan, where a JDAM, apparently loaded with improper...