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This exclusive Cogs of War interview is with Jeffrey E. Stern, an award-winning journalist and author of the newly released The Warhead: The Quest to Build the Perfect Weapon in the Age of Modern Warfare, which details the development of Paveway, the precision-guided bomb. We asked him to share his thoughts on the bomb’s history and its role in air campaigns, and the relationship between government, science, and industry.
I wanted to tell this story in part because Paveway is so underdiscussed. The big expensive weapons tend to get attention, but often it’s the smaller ones that actually get used. And I think understanding its role is a way of understanding precision airpower, but also more broadly, how and where America projects influence.
I wanted to frame this weapon almost as a character: a subject as much as an object, because I do think it began to develop something akin to agency. Long before the discussions we’re having now about AI in the kill chain, Paveway was almost arguing for its own use. Here was this easy-to-use, inexpensive, precise, and ostensibly humane weapon, which could be dropped further from the target so American servicemen and women were further from danger, and policymakers could deploy it freer from worry about collateral damage or escalation. In the book, the narrative occasionally takes you into the Situation Room or the Oval Office as presidents and senior national security staff discuss a particular foreign crisis, because I think you can see how Paveway nudges decision makers toward intervention where otherwise they might not have seriously considered it.
But also, from a storytelling point of view, the fact that Paveway is behind the scenes for all these important moments presented an opportunity for a Forrest Gump-type treatment. Most Americans have never heard of it, and yet it’s there, this mostly anonymous shadow character playing a critical role in all these historical turning points.
I hadn’t thought of it that way. But I think that tension may derive from an aspect of TI’s corporate identity, or at least its corporate mythology.
TI grew out of an oil exploration company called Geophysical Services, Inc, which had a product called the Magnetic Anomaly Detector — a device that picked up sub-surface magnetic anomalies that suggested the presence of hydrocarbons. Then, almost overnight, the service they provided was basically rendered obsolete by the attack on Pearl Harbor. The United States entered World War II, energy became a critical strategic asset, and the federal government began controlling parts of the American oil industry. The company survived in part by using its product to look for a different kind of subsurface magnetic anomaly — German U-boats. But one of the lessons that seemed to resonate through the company was that there was risk in trying to service a market that already existed. Even after shifting more into electronics and changing its name to Texas Instruments, there was a kind of license, if not imperative, to be ahead of the curve, to be in a position to exploit future needs.
The man who led the Paveway program, a gifted engineer named Weldon Word, really embodied that mindset. He was constantly looking to the future. He’d read trends and almost divine how they might intersect in order to create a new need or opportunity. And he faced some of the frustrations visionaries often do — seeing things others couldn’t yet see. So, in trying to position Paveway and TI’s whole weapons business for the future, and to inoculate their product from being taken over by events, Weldon was often trying to leverage technologies that weren’t yet mature into capabilities the customer didn’t yet know it needed.
That dynamic may feel a little foreign now, and it did begin to change during the post-Cold War defense industry consolidation. Prior to that, the mandate from the Defense Department to defense companies was primarily to create the capacity to deliver as much mass as deep into enemy territory as possible. Faster, better planes, bigger missiles, more nuclear weapons. There was less of a premium on those things once the Soviet Union was no longer a threat, and, without an obvious current threat, a comparatively greater focus on maintaining a technical edge for whatever unforeseen threats the future might hold.
I hadn’t thought of that framing — that arguably terrorism is a function of a similar or even the same dynamic as precision airpower. But I think, if you consider Paveway’s origin story, that phenomenon begins to seem intuitive, if not inevitable. The original problem Paveway solved was as much a political one as it was tactical or strategic. The air campaign in Vietnam was so dangerous for combat aviators largely because the rules of engagement constrained them. Washington was worried about escalation, and if you bombed an airfield full of fighter jets or a surface-to-air missile site, you risked killing Russian or Chinese advisors who might be nearby. Airmen were limited in how they could attack the things attacking them. They needed a way to strike targets without as much risk of collateral damage, and without needing to be so close to the target and whatever weapons were protecting it. Paveway solved both problems. It allowed America to fight a war while ostensibly minimizing the cost of war.
The idea of low-cost, low-risk fighting is perhaps always appealing, but was especially so during the Cold War. The risk of escalation between a nuclear-armed United States and a nuclear-armed Soviet Union inhibited both countries from direct military confrontation. If I can’t shoot my biggest missiles at your capital or move a battalion to your borders, what do I do? How do I try to win a war against you, without really fighting a war against you? One answer is using this new weapon that requires a much smaller footprint and can strike precise targets, so I can make you or your proxies incur a cost, or disable part of your warmaking ability, while limiting the risk of all-out war. Another answer is to send a few people who don’t wear the uniform of your country to carry out terror attacks.
I think we’re now seeing the natural evolution (or perhaps devolution) of that process. From “how do you win a war without fighting a war,” to “what happens when you don’t have to fight a war in order to try to win it?” or, even more literally, “what happens when you don’t have to declare war to go to war?” Part of the legacy of Paveway and the precision revolution it led was putting more discretion into the hands of a smaller number of people. Before Paveway, I don’t think we’d be having the same debate about a president launching an attack without consulting allies or Congress, because it wasn’t really possible. There just weren’t the tools to do that precisely and secretly.
A few factors conspired to slow the uptake of precision weapons, despite how immediately clear it was how revolutionary they were going to be from the first time Paveways were used in combat.
In Vietnam, Paveways destroyed heavily-defended targets the military had been trying and failing to destroy for years, and improved bombing accuracy more than 30-fold. But while war planners were increasingly impressed after each of Paveway’s subsequent deployments — by the British in the Falklands War, and the United States in Libya, Panama, and the first Gulf War — it did have a few limitations. Paveway steered by following a laser reflecting off the target; you had to see a target to aim a laser at it. Poor visibility was a problem, and a laser beam wasn’t impervious to dust and debris. TI and other contractors trying to get in on the precision revolution began working on other ways to steer weapons, but one of the most promising — GPS — was at that point entirely dependent on forces outside their control. GPS required adequate satellite coverage, which meant that if you wanted to make a GPS-guided weapon, you were dependent on the Air Force, which was overseeing satellite development. And the Air Force was, in turn, dependent on NASA, which was delivering the satellites into space on the Challenger shuttle. The Challenger disaster in 1988 set GPS back years, and though the United States was able to use some GPS weapons in Desert Storm in 1990 and 1991, the satellite constellation wasn’t complete until 1995, during the Yugoslav crisis.
I also think that the Yugoslavian campaign’s embrace of the Paveway-led precision revolution had to do with a convergence of stockpile and need. Production had collapsed during the post-Cold War defense industry consolidation, so there simply weren’t as many precision weapons available during previous conflicts. They also arguably weren’t quite as necessary. During Operations Desert Storm and El Dorado Canyon in Iraq and Libya in the early 1990s, the enemy was a regime in control of the state, whereas Yugoslavia was more of a civil conflict, with irregular combatants not always in uniform or at obvious military installations, often operating near civilians.
So I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the Yugoslav crisis was both the first time more precision than non-precision weapons were used, and also considered by some military historians the first time a major military campaign was won by air power alone.
If you’re a thoughtful, conscientious person, and you work hard and sacrifice to build something, you’re way less likely to be able to see its potential harms.
The people involved in developing and upgrading Paveway weren’t venal, blood thirsty, or power hungry. They were engineers, so I think in part they saw an engineering puzzle to solve. But they were also animated by the idea of keeping both pilots and civilians out of harm’s way.
And yet, I think Paveway’s legacy is that it created as much devastation as it prevented. Yes, there are certainly people alive today because the bad guys they happened to be standing near were targeted with a precision weapon rather than carpet-bombed. And there are likely people alive today because precision weapons killed bad guys before they could carry out some kind of attack, or destroyed a weapon before it could fire. But I’d also argue we’ve done a lot more bombing than we would have if we didn’t have the promise of precision. And there’s some space between the promise and the reality. And even our most precise weapons can’t, for example, correct for bad intel. Every major air campaign has some version of the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls elementary school, which was struck by precision weapons in the opening hours of Operation Epic Fury, killing at least 175 children and teachers — presumably an intelligence mistake born from the fact that the building had been a military facility at least a decade before.
While it’s hard to prove a counterfactual, I think it’s very possible precision weapons have facilitated more civilian devastation than they’ve prevented. The two Gulf Wars provide a case study for that. The second Gulf War started with a bombing campaign that “was called the most accurate air war in history, and measured by the proportion of guided munitions used — almost 70 percent — that was true. But it caused a higher proportion of civilian casualties than even the first Gulf war, in which only 9 percent were guided, and killed more people than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings combined.
Nobody who worked on Paveway was hoping for that kind of result. And I’d wager most of the people at the bleeding edge of technologies like AI are mostly excited by the benefits to humanity their work might confer, and perhaps by the satisfaction of solving engineering problems. I’d bet very few of them are motivated even just by money. But I’d also bet many are subject to the same kind of cognitive dissonance reduction that weapons manufacturers are.
I don’t think many people want to build something destructive. And I think most of us are protected from acknowledging that we might be. Alfred Nobel wrote to friends that he thought the dynamite he invented might be so powerful that countries would disband their armies. During the Manhattan Project, Niels Bohr asked Robert Oppenheimer if he thought the bomb being developed was going to be big enough. When Oppenheimer asked, “to end the war?” Niels Bohr said no, “to end all war.”
Jeffrey E. Stern is an award-winning journalist and author. His reporting spans global conflict zones and crisis epicenters and has earned awards from the Overseas Press Club and Amnesty International. He is a co-founder of The 30 Birds and Bamyan Foundations and the author of five books, including The 15:17 to Paris, which was adapted into a major motion picture and directed by Clint Eastwood. His new book, The Warhead, a narrative history of the first smart bomb, was named an Apple best book of the month.
Image: U.S. Navy photo by Photographer’s Mate 3rd Class Tyler J. Clements via Wikimedia Commons.
