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Does that even help? I mean.. even with the lights out, the Americans still know where and what to hit. Besides, with the power down, people couldn't enjoy the daily Saddam admiration video clips.
Still no blackout in Baghdad. It's �ber-silly. To hit anything smaller than a Presidential Palace, you have to laser-illuminate, which requires you to be able to acquire the target visually, which is damn sight easier if the city is lit than if you have to wander in the dark with NVGs. And as long as you illuminate for your buddy, you are a good target for the SAMs and the AAA.
High tech hasn't outdated blackouts yet. Even partial stealth counts, or else things like the F-117 wouldn't have been built...
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The funny thing is, there are so many foreign journalists out on the roofs watching the (brightly-lit) show, some of them could well be Special Forces with laser targetting equipment and the Iraqis'd never know it.
quote:Originally posted by Vogon Poet: The funny thing is, there are so many foreign journalists out on the roofs watching the (brightly-lit) show, some of them could well be Special Forces with laser targetting equipment and the Iraqis'd never know it.
I always thought there was something odd about Ted Koppel and Peter Arnult, or however you spell it.
-------------------- Sparky:: Think! Question Authority, Authoritatively. “Believe nothing of what you hear, and only half of what you see.” EMSparks
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That is a pretty rough way to play laser tag, and makes the person that should be 'it' kind of slow and groggy....
I think that they can hit a small store with out the laser aiming.
-------------------- "You are a terrible human, Ritten." Magnus "Urgh, you are a sick sick person..." Austin Powers A leek too, pretty much a negi.....
Registered: Sep 2000
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In theory, the JDAM bombs (the simple iron bombs with those fancy strakes bolted onto the midbody and with the extra tailfins) can hit a target within a 20m circle 95% of the time if the GPS coordinates of that target are known and if sufficiently many satellites are visible to the bomb throughout its flight. Even without GPS, they are claimed to have 30m CEP if the coordinates are known and the onboard INS doesn't hiccup. All that without illumination.
In practice, the JDAM is not the weapon of choice for targets that require accurate hits. Laser guidance for those older Paveway series bombs still is the standard method, and F-117 and F-15E are reputed to be the the main delivery aircraft. Those do need to loiter above the target to illuminate, and pretty low, too, when there's smoke and dust in the air.
Navy F-14s and some F/A-18s have some limited illumination capability, but they mainly deliver JDAMs and dumb weapons, and aren't used above Baghdad AFAIK (or AFA Aviation Week knows). The Harriers cannot JDAM AFAIK, but two-ships of them work as hunter-killer pairs with Paveways or cluster bombs. B-52 is a JDAM and dumb bomb platform for the most part.
There may be some GPS jamming capacity in Iraq, as it's not that hard to come by. And of course they can always move the city fifteen meters to the left between bombing runs to confuse the hell out of GPS-guided weapons.
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