Bomb's Missing

investmenttool.com technology journal

Last Thursday, the Pentagon acknowledged that one of their satellite guided bombs accidentally hit a civilian home near its target. The stated reason was that one of the people programming the targeting coordinates into the bomb. That really shouldn't have happened.

A simple program showing the location to be hit when the coordinates are typed in should have indicated the problem. Since the targets were chosen by computer, why were they entered by hand into the targeting computer?

These are good questions and the answer is pretty simple. In our interconnected world, the computers used to choose targets can't talk to the targeting computers on the bomber or the bomb. Alternatively, the target coordinates are chosen by hand and they were incorrectly transcribed.

Either answer is kind of amazing. With all of the high technology our military used, it takes years to design and build the weapons systems we are using against terrorists in Afghanistan.

The B-1 Bomber was designed in the 1970's cancelled by President Carter and revived by President Reagan in 1981. The B-2 Bomber was designed in the late 1970's and supposed to replace the B-1. Now we have both. The F-14 fighters, flying off carriers in the Arabian Sea were put into service in the 1970's.

These systems have been upgraded, gutted and rebuilt but data transfer was not one of the things they had in mind. So, there was no map to let the data entry guy know a mistake was made and poof, four persons are dead.

I don't have much sympathy. They may be innocent civilians, but they've tolerated a government that harbors Ossama bin Laden. The fact to be remembered here is that bin Laden aimed for and got 6,000 innocent civilians. We have aimed for the military and accidentally gotten less than five percent of that total.

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Shmuel Protter
investmenttool.com

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