War Made New by Max Boot

Author:Max Boot
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2006-06-20T16:00:00+00:00

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Since the dawn of the Gunpowder Age, projectiles had been on their own once they were expelled from a gun barrel or, later, from an airplane’s bomb bay. No matter how carefully a gunner or bombardier aimed prior to firing, once the trigger had been pulled he no longer had any control over where the munitions went. They were at the mercy of the laws of ballistics and gravity, and hence not very accurate.

That first began to change in World War II. The Germans took the lead; their Fritz X, a radio-controlled bomb, was used against the Allied landing fleet at Salerno, Italy, in 1943. But most of their efforts were not terribly successful. More than half of the V-2 rockets aimed at London missed the metropolitan area altogether because of the inaccuracy of their clumsy gyroscopic steering mechanisms. U.S. scientists did not fare much better. Most of their guided-bomb projects—one program was designed to convert old B-17s and B-24s into unmanned missiles, another to copy the V-1 and V-2—did not get off the ground. Their only success was the VB-1 Azon, a thousand-pound bomb with a radio receiver that could be steered toward its target by a bombardier. More than 450 Azons were dropped in the war; they proved particularly effective in knocking out bridges in Japanese-occupied Burma.

Although a few radio-controlled bombs were also used in the Korean War, the whole field languished in the 1950s and early 1960s. The U.S. Air Force was the natural outlet for smart bombs, but until the mid-1960s its bomb development was delegated to the army and navy ordnance departments, making it a bureaucratic orphan. Who needed accurate munitions anyway, if (as the working assumption had it) the bombs of the next war would be atomic? It took the Vietnam War to revive interest in precision-guidance technology and to spark a general renaissance in air warfare.

The U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force, which had put all of their energies into getting ready for nuclear conflict against the Soviet Union, were woefully ill-prepared for the type of conventional combat they encountered in the skies over North Vietnam. Heavy jet fighters such as the F-105 Thunderchief were not agile enough for dogfighting against Soviet-built MiG-17s and MiG-21s. U.S. guided air-to-air missiles, like the AIM-4 Falcon and AIM-7 Sparrow, designed to hit big and slow Soviet bombers, proved ineffective against small and fast Soviet-built North Vietnamese fighters. American fighter pilots, who had enjoyed a lopsided advantage in the latter days of World War II and throughout the Korean War, found themselves barely able to hold their own in air-to-air combat over Vietnam.

They had even worse luck in dealing with ground fire, which had been revolutionized by the development of surface-to-air missiles after World War II. This new weapon first proved its effectiveness in 1960, when a Soviet SA-2 radar-guided battery shot down Gary Francis Powers’s U-2 spy plane. The Soviets amply supplied their North Vietnamese allies with SA-2s and radar-controlled flak guns, later supplemented by SA-7 shoulder-fired missiles.

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