Destroying Enemy WMD Sites in Wartime Is No Easy Task, Official Says

By David Ruppe
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — The accurate bombing of enemy chemical and biological weapons sites during combat without disastrously dispersing the deadly agents is a difficult task that may exceed current U.S. capabilities, but is not necessarily insurmountable, a senior U.S. official said Wednesday.

In a candid speech to industry representatives and military personnel, Stephen Younger, director of the U.S. Defense Department’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency, detailed various challenges the United States faces in attacking WMD facilities, targets he considers to contain the greatest threats to U.S. security.

“Weapons of mass destruction are the only serious military threats to the United States today,” he said, and described the complex problem of targeting them while weighing the various factors such as knowledge of the target, probability of success given certain types of weapons, and the potential collateral damage.

“How do we nullify any advantage that they would accrue in acquiring weapons of mass destruction?” he said.

You might “have to be able to do it quickly from the time of decision. This [may be] a very high-value target, identified in real time. National decision authority may be involved in real time, [ordering to] take out that target and do it now,” he said.

Younger’s agency in particular is at the forefront of efforts to develop these capabilities, complemented by other elements of the military seeking so-called “Global Strike” capabilities to enable U.S. forces to quickly neutralize any target almost any place on the planet. 

With respect to Global Strike, “We are moving into a time where if we know where a target is and we have some basic characterizes of the target, we will be able to destroy that target anywhere on the planet,” he said.

“This does not involve magic technologies. It applies the application of technologies that either exist today or with very high confidence are in development today,” he said.

Many key capabilities needed for solving the chemical and biological weapon challenge, however, require much more work, he said. 

Having excellent intelligence is the “single most important determinant of future battle success” and perhaps the biggest hurdle to overcome, according to Younger.

“The problem is, where are the targets?” he said.

“When you talk to Gen. [Leon] LaPorte, [commander] of the United States forces in Korea, the problem he says is there are literally thousands of buried structures within walking distance of the DMZ and North Korea. What do they contain?  If there were a conflict in North Korea, what is the priority sequencing of targets? What’s inside?  So intelligence becomes the critical enabler of battle success for the future,” Younger said.

The solution is to do a better job of human intelligence gathering, he said.

“There are some things you are just not going to see from space,” he said.

In addition to location, particular knowledge of the storage facility and the type of agent stored there are also important, Younger said.

Penetrating and then detonating munitions accurately, for instance, can be affected by wind speed, munitions velocities and soil conditions, he said.

For buried facilities, intelligence is needed on the surrounding soil, whether it is frozen for instance, or wet, or contains rocks, he said.

“What kind of rocks? That’s the kind of detail that you need to know if you’re going to put one of these penetrators in with high precision and then you’re going to penetrate some concrete when you get through,” he said.

Knowledge of the adversary’s building methods and materials also needs to be known and tested against, he said.

“If you build one of these [test] bunkers with good hard U.S. concrete, and good hard U.S. steel, and you put good hard U.S. blast doors in, and you demonstrate you can destroy that target, don’t be too comfortable,” he said.

“Because if the adversary is using porous concrete, and bad steel, and crummy blast doors, and they’re open instead of closed, you may get a different effect on the adversary’s target than you want. You may release a lot more stuff, or you may not achieve the other military objective that you want,” he said.

“Until you’ve done a test of this weapon, you’ve got a theory, you haven’t got a weapon. You have to go out and demonstrate it against as high a fidelity target as you can possibly get,” he added.

Having excellent planning tools for calculating the ideal weapon configuration for achieving a particular military objective in a particular situation also is necessary, Younger said.

“How are you going to employ this weapon? What is the release altitude, what is the impact velocity? If you have multiple weapons hitting the same target, what is the timing between that?” Younger said.

“What is the timing for release, what is the timing for impact, what’s the timing for detonation? What is the effect you achieve from the first weapon? Are you going to levelize the surface so that you get better penetration for the second weapon? Are you going to complete the collapse [with] the second weapon that you achieved from the first weapon?” he continued.

“If you don’t have a planning tool, you don’t have a weapon,” he said.

Once it is determined what capability is preferred, actually producing that “tailored” weapon is a challenge.

“What’s the effect that you want to achieve based on the target you want to destroy?” Younger said.

“Do you want a high pressure pulse, followed by a lot of shrapnel, followed by a thermal pulse? Do you want minimum amounts of shrapnel? … What sort of molecules will do that for you? Do you want conventional high explosives, do you want fuel air. Do you want a thermobaric mixture?  Do you want exotic metal loading?”

“Do you want a carbon composite case to minimize metal shrapnel, a steel case to maximize shrapnel? Do you want to score that to achieve shrapnel sizes? What is the sequence of those effects?  Do you want multiple detonators? Do you want to protect one part of the weapon while the other part is detonating?” he said. 

The military is farthest along in addressing the explosives end of things, he said.

“Seldom has weapons design been as exciting as it is today in being able to design a new weapon to achieve a specific military effect. We’re being able to shoot further, longer-range, we’re being able to shoot faster, to get there quicker, we’re being able to penetrate further, into shallow buried targets, and sometimes into exceptionally hard targets,” he said.

More difficult, however, is destroying protected chemical and biological weapons facilities while minimizing the release of the agents through containment and incineration, he said. Failure could cost thousands of lives to nearby civilians, he said. 

“These are niche targets, weapons of mass destruction targets, hardened and deeply buried targets. They tend not to build many of them the same way. So it’s not a case of, ‘Well I’ve got a class of weapons that I can apply to that class of targets so I can get assured destruction every time,”” he said.

Tailoring weapons for such targets can be a matter of minimizing collateral damage to dozens as opposed to thousands of people, he said.

If a bunker containing 12 kilograms of dry anthrax were struck and 90 percent of it was contained, thousands of fatalities might ensue, he said. If 99 percent were contained, dozens of people might die.

We “want to get into the ballpark of 99-percent containment, 99.9-percent containment. This is a tall order, this is a tough problem, but I think that we can do this in some cases if we understand the target well enough,” he said.

Ideally, you would want to avoid fatalities, “but that might not be possible,” he said.

“So where are the break points, what are you willing to accept if this is a high-value targets and you know that if you don’t eliminate this target you are going to have serious problem in the very near future, so it’s not an option to leave that target there?” he said.

For especially hardened, more deeply buried targets that conventional munitions may not reach, he said, penetrating nuclear munitions may be an option.

“We don’t need nuclear [weapons] to achieve most of our military objectives,” he said, but said, “There is a role for nuclear weapons in telling an adversary, ‘If you think you can hide in that space, guess again, because if there is a sufficiently serious threat to the United States, we will destroy that,’” he said. 

“If it is a supreme national interest to the United States, that’s why we have those things,” he said.

Lastly, reliable, near-real-time damage assessment of a target is important, Younger said, so forces know whether the target needs to be struck again or whether nearby U.S. forces need to don protective suits.

A solution possibly preferable to sending U.S. special operations forces into the area to report, would be to jettison sensors from munitions just before and attack which could instantly report back evidence of an agent release, he said.

“There are a variety of ways you can do that. We’re not there yet.  We’ve made amazing progress in the explosive part of the weapon. We have a lot of work to do on the sensor part,” he said.

The challenge is not impossible, he said.

“We’ve done things like this before, [using systems] that can sustain high-G environments, scatter all across the desert floor, report back … but we haven’t done it in terms of a complete package,” he said.

Younger suggested cost could be a factor there.

“If it costs a billion dollars, you’re not going to deploy it. So having reasonable costs for these systems makes them deployable in the field,” he said.

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