A misguided bomb that hit a residential area in Afghanistan Friday, apparently killing four people and wounding eight others, was one of a new breed of satellite-guided missiles designed to achieve greater accuracy.
The bomb, called a Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM), had a Global Positioning System receiver built in and used satellites to guide it to a specific longitude and latitude that was programmed into the bomb before it was released from a Navy F-18.
Human error may have caused the bomb to miss its target.
"Preliminary indications are that the accident occurred from a targeting process error," the Department of Defense said in a statement released Saturday. That would mean the wrong target had been programmed in, either before the plane took off or while it was en route to deliver the bomb.
The 2000-pound bomb, released by a U.S. Navy F/A-18 Hornet, hit a residential area near Kabul Airport in Afghanistan at approximately 6:30 p.m. EDT on Oct. 12. The intended target was a military helicopter at the airport, about a mile away.
designed to help achieve pinpoint strikes and avoid what the military calls collateral damage -- the loss of civilian lives.
"We regret the loss of any civilian life," the Department of Defense statement read. "U.S. forces are intentionally striking only military and terrorist targets. They take great care in their targeting process to avoid civilian casualties."
The statement said that casualties from Friday's mistake could only be estimated, but that reports from the ground indicated there may were four deaths and eight injuries. Officials are investigating the mistake and said it may take several days to determine what happened.
The snafu was at least the second in Afghanistan in which civilians have been killed by an errant U.S.-led attack. The first involved a Tomahawk cruise missile that killed four United Nations officials earlier last week in Kabul. Other unconfirmed events have been claimed by the Taliban.
In 1999, the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade was accidentally hit by a JDAM bomb, according to U.S. State Department records. The wrong building had been identified in that attack, which occurred during the NATO air campaign in Kosovo.
About the JDAM bomb
JDAM's reliance on the Global Positioning System means the bombs should be accurate even during cloudy weather. They were developed in part as a response to deficiencies seen in the 1991 Gulf War, when bad weather sometimes forced a halt or curtailment to bombing raids.
JDAM bombs are also favored because a pilot can deliver them from high altitude and without having to do any manual guidance, reducing the risk to a delivering bomber squad.
Target coordinates can be loaded into the aircraft before takeoff and then can be manually altered by the aircrew before the bomb is released. The Department of Defense says testing has shown the bomb is accurate to within 43 feet (13 meters).
JDAM can be launched from low or high altitudes when a bomber is in a dive or during straight and level flight.
The Navy and Air Force have been in the process of converting tens of thousands of "dumb" bombs into "smart" JDAM bombs in recent years. The conversion involves installing a GPS receiver and a new maneuvering device in a bomb's tail. The construction of some 87,000 conversion kits was contracted out to the Boeing Corp.
The cost to convert each bomb is estimated at $14,000.
JDAM bombs can be delivered by several types of military aircraft, including the Air Force's B-52, B-2, B-1, F-15, F-16, F-22 and F-117, and the Navy's F/A-18, F-14, and AV-8B.
More than 450 JDAMs were dropped during testing in the late 1990s. The military says they were 95 percent reliable, a rate considered very high compared to conventional bombs.
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