Word: tomahawk
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Less than two hours after Bush’s deadline for Saddam Hussein to leave Iraq, the U.S. military attacked with tomahawk cruise missiles and precision-guided bombs dropped from F-17 stealth fighter bombers...
...tech bombs to hit targets in Iraq. Over an encrypted email system, strategists are dotting the map, marking coordinates, which are entered into a missile's guidance system using Global Positioning technology. As soon as they have their orders, some 30 ships will shower these pre-planned targets with Tomahawk Cruise Missiles, an 18 foot long weapon that carries a 1000 pound warhead. Saddam has seen these before, during the Gulf War. They seldom miss their target - something that Iraqi civilians are banking on as they brace themselves for war. In Baghdad, when asked why they were not building shelters...
...says a Bush Administration official. The counterterrorism team argued that the Taliban had shot at the UAV during the Clinton test, so its existence was hardly a secret. Besides, combined with on-the-ground intelligence, a Predator might just gather enough information in time to get a Tomahawk off to the target. But when the deputies held their fourth and final meeting on July 16, they still hadn't sorted out what to do with the Predator. Squabbles over who would pay for it continued into August...
...lack of intelligence on bin Laden's movements. "We've got to do better than this," he scribbled on one memo. "This is unsatisfactory." Second, even if a target could ever be found, the missiles might take too long to hit it. The Pentagon thought it could dump a Tomahawk missile on bin Laden's camp within six hours of a decision to attack, but the experts in the White House thought that was impossibly long. Any missiles fired at Afghanistan would have to fly over Pakistan, and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) was close to the Taliban...
...with a surging budget, no hard choices are being made. The defense plan allows for some modest transformation: the Navy will spend $1 billion to convert four Trident submarines that now fire nuclear missiles into Tomahawk cruise-missile launchers. The Army will fork out $707 million to develop lighter tanks, and the Air Force will pay $629 million to accelerate development of the Global Hawk unmanned spy plane, which flies farther and higher than the Predator, surveying more terrain. The Pentagon wants $3.3 billion to speed the gathering and distribution of intelligence, and $1.3 billion to improve communications. Special forces...