Basic Overview. The purpose of any smart bomb is to deliver a warhead against a pinpoint ground target, which might be moving. Design aspects of the warhead, including special fuzing and the type of explosive used, can make the bomb even smarter at neutralizing whatever it’s aimed at. Smart bombs might be self-propelled, in the form of cruise missiles or ballistic missiles. They might need transportation by another airborne platform -- manned or uninhabited or even autonomous -- and be let loose to glide the last part of their way. They might be hybrids, too, with rocket boosters to give them greater stand-off range, or higher kinetic energy at the crucial moment of impact. Their warhead could be high explosive, fuel-air explosive, cluster bomblets, hyperbaric bunker buster, or even electromagnetic pulse, depending on their target. As a class they’re very versatile weapons indeed.

But they’re not perfect, even assuming the intelligence data for planning a smart bomb raid is completely reliable, and mechanical performance of the entire delivery system has no flaws. They’re imperfect because their terminal homing guidance modes are subject to defeat by a clever enough opponent. And the one problem with smart bombs, as employed in recent years, is that a near-miss is as good as a mile -- in fact, a near-miss by a live warhead can cause catastrophic collateral damage.

Our enemy might be high-tech or low-tech, First World or Third World. This distinction is becoming blurred, though, almost to the point of irrelevance, as technology proliferates. The world’s underground arms market is glutted with product, while some countries (Russia, North Korea, France?) will export warfighting equipment to any nation or faction with tradable coveted goods or hard cash. Deadly advanced materiel has already, or will eventually, make its way to terrorist groups.

The best method for an opponent to protect against smart bombs is to take a holistic approach. Thus we need to get in the minds of our enemies, and look hard at what they’ve done or what they could do to make our smart bombs be not so smart.

1. Harden the target by out-digging us. Despotic countries like Saddam’s Iraq, or Qadaffi’s Libya, when given time are able to construct deep hardened bunkers. Sub-national and trans-national groups, such as al Qaeda and the Taliban, can instead use natural caves in mountains and enlarge them, much as Imperial Japanese troops did on island bastions like Iwo Jima; Kim’s North Korea are masters at using mountains for ready-made overhead cover. Tunnel networks, with subdivisions or tight turns to contain heat and blast, enhance protection while making it difficult to know exactly which part of a large underground complex needs hitting. Dig deep enough, say 1,000 feet down, and high-explosive ground penetrator rounds become useless. Put the entrance in broken terrain where a smart bomb trajectory can’t get at it, and the bad actors are safer still.

2. Harden the target by out-psyching us. There are ways of protecting something that sits in plain sight: Put the command post, radar installation, or other high value target in a hospital full of patients, or in a house of worship, or in a school. (Think of Saddam’s minions during Operation Iraqi Freedom.) Protect the target by putting into it priceless, publicized artifacts. (NATO hesitated to bomb Milosevic’s palace in the Balkans wars because there was an irreplaceable Rembrandt painting on the first floor.) In some cases, placing the target in a crowded town or city, among a dense civilian population, might be enough to give pause to a country like America, who’s increasingly averse to harming innocents during combat. (The fact that using civilians as human shields is a war crime rarely deters a mass-murderer tyrant or terrorist.) In this way our opponent can use and manipulate different sectors of the worldwide media so as to, in effect, place psychological warfare “armor” around crucial facilities.

3. Confuse the homing sensors -- list of homing modes. Every smart bomb uses software and sensors to be told about its target, and then to find that target precisely during the final part of its flight. Many different homing modes are available:

a. Home on a chosen radar transmitter’s transmissions.

b. Home on the reflections of a laser beam that designates the target.

c. Home on the physical location of the target, using GPS.

d. Home on stored optical images of the target, which include a computer model to judge the target from different angles.

e. Home on the infrared signature of the target, using the heat that all objects give off.

f. Home-in using terrain conformance (TerCom) look-down radar, matching the smart bomb’s track against pre-set prominent terrain features.

g. Home under manual control, using a TV camera in the smart bomb’s nose. This list at best is partial, as new modes are being developed, some of them classified. Note that some of these homing modes are active, while others are passive. Some of them go back to the Vietnam era, or even to World War II.

4. Confuse the homing sensors -- methods of spoofing. The following are a few ways in which homing modes can be confused, in corresponding order to the modes-list, a through f:

a. Mount the radar on a highly mobile ground vehicle, and operate the radar only intermittently. Provide redundant radars covering the same area, which only begin to radiate if the first radar is put out of action.

b. Use laser detectors to know that the target is being illuminated. Use a dispersed network of laser emitters, tunable to the proper homing frequency, to divert the warhead from its proper path. A variant on a fuel-air explosive that generates a sudden big smoke cloud can also block the laser designator enough for drift to make the smart bomb miss a hardened target.

c. Scramble the Global Positioning System signals. Devices for doing so locally do exist. Before Operation Iraqi Freedom began, a civilian posted the design for one on the Internet -- it was soon taken down, for good reason. The electronic parts needed could be purchased at supply stores found in many large shopping malls. In addition, Russia is believed to have created such devices, which might be exported. A different approach would use cryptography and cyberwarfare to attack the GPS signals and alter them nearer their source. According to experts, this strategic threat to the system cannot be ruled out.

d. Protect the target with pre-positioned, concealed, but fast-acting camouflage. New techniques exist at least in prototype stages now. Certain materials will dramatically change their shape under stimulation by electrical currents or heat. If placed along the distinctive edges and corners or protrusions of a target, and activated while smart bombs with their stored instructions are already in the air, the enemy gains protection. By getting inside the timeframe of the programming, launch, and transit-to-target cycle, the target can change its appearance enough for the smart bomb to likely miss. Other materials, also electro-active, can alter the color and optical reflectivity of an object or building. This can be coupled with a camera that looks behind the target to see what’s there, and then projects that image onto the front of the target. The target appears to vanish. Researchers in Japan have already demonstrated a raincoat that makes part of the wearer seem to disappear as he or she walks down the street. A more low-tech smokescreen can also beat optical homing sensors.

e. Infrared decoys of different degrees of sophistication can be employed. These include heat flares on parachutes ejected at a distance from the actual target. They also can include heating elements on the target itself, which when activated alter the infrared image of the target substantially. Certain types of chemical smokescreen are opaque to infrared, and as in d above these could provide some protection.

f. TerCom has limitations. Over the ocean or vast tracts of desert or steppes, terrain is too featureless for useful guidance. In a complex urban setting, data may be too abundant and may change too fast. (Inertial-navigation assist grows less accurate with greater range.) TerCom, because of its tight look-down radar beam, is blind toward its front. Mobile barrage balloons, supporting a mesh of strong spun-monofilament fibers and explosive det-cord, can smash or pre-detonate a TerCom smart bomb than never even knows the danger is there.

g. This mode might be the toughest to stop, partly because a human is in the loop. Humans can exercise intuition and insight, and are thus much more flexible that the best existing autonomous software. The ideal technique to defeat this homing mode -- besides a smokescreen -- might be active attack against the controller platform, the data link, or the TV camera in the smart bomb’s nose. This leads to the next basic topic.

5. Attack part of the smart bomb system. Manned platforms that must loiter to provide guidance instructions can be shot down, and friendly troops on the ground in that role can be shot at. Bombs guided by radio signals can have those signals jammed. Even highly directional and frequency-agile radios can be jammed in a local area given the proper equipment and adequate power supply. Bombs guided by wire can have the wire broken by a wall of anti-aircraft cannon fire. Warheads homing by any optical or infrared method can be blinded in flight by lasers with a wattage output attainable now by many nations’ industrial and weapons labs. If an uninhabited airborne platform launched the TV- or laser-guided smart bomb, additional potential vulnerabilities exist. Not only might the launching platform be directly attacked, but the data uplink/downlink to the pilot on the ground might be actively broken, and the ground control station itself might even in an extreme case be assaulted. When satellites are used for homing purposes or as control-data relays, those satellites themselves might be attacked. Expensive advanced technology is needed for this, but future opponents of America and our Allies may already, or soon, own such capabilities.

6. Decoy the smart bombs with look-alike structures. The new electro-active materials mentioned earlier, which change their shape and/or color upon command, could be coupled with fast-erecting objects such as inflatable structures. These might be placed near a high value target, ordered to inflate when smart bombs are incoming. Some bombs might be spoofed into hitting an expendable look-alike rather than the high value real thing. Also, large sheets of optical- and radar-opaque material might be quickly draped over targets and nearby buildings and trees, to prevent a smart bomb from orienting with sufficient accuracy.

7. Use espionage to learn technical specs of the system. The risk of spies should never be underestimated. Such cases as the Walker brothers, Ames, Pollard, and Hanssen demonstrate that even U.S. citizens sometimes provide top-secret information to a foreign country. Other cases, where sensitive technology was sold improperly to potential or actual enemies, should heighten concern that classified data and military equipment will be leaked. The steady procession of convictions and indictments for espionage in the past twenty years ought to suggest to American senior leadership that other spies -- of various nationalities and loyalties -- remain active among us, still uncaught. Details on the homing software and sensor hardware of a smart bomb are very useful to devise optimum countermeasures, whose existence might not be revealed until war breaks out. Espionage thus poses an ever-present threat that a “surprise attack” could be launched to neutralize America’s smart bombs when we need them most.

Conclusion. The above discussion is not meant to be alarmist. Its purpose is to help assure that complacency on smart bomb design is avoided. Smart bombs will need to get smarter all the time in the 21st century, because our enemies are getting smarter. The new generation of Tactical Tomahawks, which can loiter awaiting a target and be redirected by radio while in flight, is just one example of major progress. We mustn’t leave such key weapon systems vulnerable to an aggressor-induced “IQ crash,” an effective guidance system lobotomy. Were that to occur, and the software didn’t have a way to realize it and immediately disarm or divert the warhead, a live bomb “Made in America” might destroy an orphanage or maternity ward. The results of a smart bomb going dumb could thus be devastating to all parties -- except the regime or warlord we need to defeat.

JoeBuff.Com / Joe Buff Inc. Joe Buff, President Dutchess County, New York E-Mail readermail@JoeBuff.Com