In the last years of the twentieth century, two weapons changed the way that America fights air wars: smart bombs (bombs that “see” a target using a television camera or a radiation sensor, or that head for a programmed location) and UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles). Smart bombs came into their own in the first Gulf War. Reconnaissance UAVs proved their worth in Bosnia and Kosovo in the late 1990s, and offensive UAVs began firing missiles in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere a few years later.
The American public got its first look at smart bombs on January 17, 1991. Iraq had invaded Kuwait five months earlier, and President George H. Bush had put together a UN-backed coalition to force its withdrawal. Iraq had the world’s fourth-largest army, at 955,000 men, and it faced a coalition force only two-thirds that size. America’s last experience of a real war had been the long disaster of Vietnam—nineteen years from start to finish, 58,000 American dead, and 153,000 wounded—and even experienced military officers feared that the Gulf War might be a reprise of Vietnam.
Gen. Edward Meyer, a former Army chief of staff, predicted that America would suffer ten thousand to thirty thousand casualties in driving Iraq out of Kuwait. Saddam Hussein was counting on exactly that and reportedly told U.S. ambassador April Glaspie, “Americans cannot stand 10,000 dead.”
Americans watched the war in their living rooms. Tomahawk cruise missiles flew by journalists’ Baghdad hotel windows and blew up government buildings. One after another, American fighter planes “plinked” Iraqi tanks with Maverick missiles, and CNN replayed the video clips: the pilot locked the missile’s sensor onto the tank’s image, pushed a button, and the missile did the rest. By the time the coalition’s ground attack began in mid-February, the Iraqi army had already been seriously degraded. One Iraqi general said, “During the Iran war, my tank was my friend because I could sleep in it and know I was safe. . . . During this war my tank became my enemy. . . . [N]one of my troops would get near a tank at night because they just kept blowing up.” Although only 8 percent of the bombs dropped were smart bombs, they did 75 percent of the damage.
The next attack: “An explosive-stuffed model airplane guided by GPS” - Salon.com
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