Power tool describes the Tomahawk cruise missile and how it has changed warfare:
The idea that going to war carries a near-certain risk that thousands of your own soldiers will die; the idea that mass civilian casualties on the enemy’s side are inevitable, or that whole societies must inevitably be obliterated in targeting their leaderships; the idea that wars are massive, all-or-nothing undertakings between entire peoples that cannot be entered into lightly or with limited commitment: all would tumble — in the strategic thinking of America’s military planners, if not always in reality — in the era that began with the San Clemente test. It reached its fullest expression on Wednesday night in Baghdad, when around 40 Tomahawks, fired from battleships in the Persian Gulf, rained down on “leadership targets”.
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The new symbol [of the American military] is 21in in diameter, 18ft long, weighs 2,650lbs, has a range of 690 miles, costs $600,00 and is packed with circuit boards manufactured at a secret facility run by Raytheon, the defence contractor, outside Phoenix, Arizona. Since its debut, claims of its accuracy – it is now capable, the air force says, of guiding itself past obstacles and around corners to within 7m of a pre-programmed target – have prompted breathlessness among the media. It can hit “a target the size of a mailbox with almost as much accuracy as the postal service,” Fortune magazine declared, as early as 1990.
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“During the second world war, an average B-17 bomb during a bombing run missed its target by some 2,300ft,” Warden told General Norman Schwarzkopf and the then defence secretary Dick Cheney, according to David Halberstam’s book War in a Time of Peace. “Therefore, if you wanted a 90% probability of hitting a particular target, you had to drop some 9,000 bombs. That required a bombing run of 1,000 bombers and placed 1,000 men at risk. By contrast, with the new weaponry, one plane flown by one man with one bomb could have the same probability.” And Tomahawks, it seemed, could do similarly well without even that risk.