Free Sex, Bombs and Burgers by Peter Nowak Page B

Iraqi forces, however, were of the “smart” kind; the rest were the traditional variety.
    Still, smart bombs had proven their worth and their usage has steadily increased in each subsequent conflict. Fully 90 percent of the bombs brought to Iraq by American forces for the second go-round in 2003 were “smart.” 4 The laser guidance used in the weapons, meanwhile, has gone mainstream in recent years, primarily in cars, where it has been incorporated into collision-avoidance systems. Toyota, for one, introduced a laser cruise control system in its 2001 Lexus which, like many of the robot vehicles in the DARPA road races, used beams of light to track other cars ahead of it.
    If the videos of smart bombs flying into Iraqi targets in stunning first-person view were not enough to impress the public, most of whom were watching it all unfold on CNN, then the images of night-time air attacks were. The scenes I remember best involved the volleys of Iraqi anti-aircraft fire arcing upward at unseen stealth bombers high above. First, an orchestral cascade of lights would fly into the sky, followed shortly thereafter by a brilliant, expanding explosion on the ground. It seemed to be clear evidence of which side was winning. Like many people watching, I was awed by the technology and not thinking of the lives lost. All of it, of course, was broadcast in its full green-tinged glory.
    Night vision was another technology that had been sitting around for a while. The earliest version of it was invented by the American army during the Second World War and saw small-scale use in sniper-rifle scopes in the Pacific. About three hundred rifles were equipped with the large scopes, but the poor range of only about a hundred metres limited them to defending the perimeter of bases. Nazi scientists also developed night-vision “Vampir” rifles and mounted similar units on a few tanks. The problem with both versions was that they used large infrared searchlights to illuminate targets so that gunners equipped with scopes could see them. This gave away the searchlights’ position, making them easy targets.
    By the Vietnam War, American scientists had improved the technology to use available light, such as moonlight, which again limited use to when weather conditions were good. By 1990 the technology had entered its third generation and evolved to use “forward-looking infrared” (FLIR) image intensifiers, which electronically captured and amplified ambient light onto a display, such as a television monitor or goggles.
    A FLIR device displays a monochrome image, usually green or grey, because it uses light from just below the spectrum visible to the eye. The technology therefore needs no additional light sources and functions well in any sort of weather. The new goggles were small, light, low-power and cheap (you can buy them online today for a couple hundred dollars), which is why the U.S. Army bought them by the truckload for Desert Storm. Night-vision was also incorporated into a lot of the military’s sensor and video technology, including the cameras that captured those green-tinged bombing images broadcast on CNN. If smart bombs were miraculous, the night-vision sights used bypilots and the goggles worn by ground troops were even more so, because they allowed coalition forces to “own the night.” “Our night-vision capability provided the single greatest mismatch of the war,” said one American general. 5
    After the war, night-vision technology was adopted quickly by the mainstream, particularly in security. Parking enforcement, highway rest stops, tunnel surveillance, transit systems, ports, prisons, hospitals, power plants and even pest inspectors all found it amazingly useful. The spread of night vision closely paralleled the rise of digital cameras, which also underwent their baptism of fire during the Gulf War. Both technologies became remarkably cheap, remarkably fast and began to converge, with night vision becoming a standard