Opinion Smart Bombs, Dumb Bombers By DOUGLAS LUMMIS	フレームで見る  英文をプリントする  脚注をプリントする
優れた兵器と愚かな投下者 優れた兵器と愚かな投下者 昨年5月に起きた、ユーゴスラビアの 中国大使館誤爆事件以来、11ヵ月ぶりにＣＩＡは 誤爆の当事者の処分について公表した。だがそれは、 また誤爆が繰り返されるのではないかという 不安を抱かせる内容のものだ。

There is an old (?) saying about computers: "Garbage in, garbage out." It means that however much "artificial intelligence" your computer may possess, if you give it dumb instructions, it will give you dumb results.

The same is true for "smart bombs." It is said that they go and blow up only what they are told to blow up. I don't believe it, but even if it is true, if the people giving them instructions are dummies, the "smart bomb" will behave no better than the dumbest "dumb bomb" ever made.

During last year's 78-day NATO air assault on Belgrade, NATO and the U.S. military began to run out of targets. So they asked U.S. intelligence agencies to suggest places to bomb. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had one suggestion: the headquarters of the Yugoslav Federal Directorate of Supply and Procurement, an agency that they believed regulated weapons supplies.

The CIA official investigating this learned the address — No. 2 Umetnosti Blvd. But the map he had didn't show the house numbers on Umetnosti Boulevard. It did, however, show the numbers on parallel streets. The official concluded that No. 2 on Umetnosti Boulevard. must be in the same relative position as No. 2 on parallel streets nearby.

Can you believe it? On this flimsy basis a decision was made to bomb a building, and to kill or wound the people in it. The CIA would have done better to ask the advice of any taxi driver or anyone who delivers mail. Or anyone who has lived in a city where houses have street numbers.

For in fact, houses with the same number are sometimes in the same relative position, and sometimes not. So all one could say about the target the CIA selected was, maybe it was the right building, and maybe not.

As it happened, it was not.

Up to this point the story seems pretty funny, if you like black humor. But it is not funny at all. The building turned out to be, as all the world knows now, the Chinese Embassy, where three people were killed and 20 wounded. The Chinese government and people were, quite naturally, outraged, and demanded an investigation, punishment of those responsible and compensation.

Finally, 11 months after the bombing, the CIA announced that the fellow who made the mistake described above had been punished by being fired and escorted out of his office building.

Several others were punished by being placed on probation for one year, which means they will be unable to receive any promotions or awards during that time. These are, I suppose, people who knew about the targeting procedure and saw nothing wrong with it.

And this means, I also suppose, that in the United States' next war, these dummies will again be selecting targets.

I propose that we each send to the CIA a recent map of our neighborhood, with the house numbers clearly marked. Just in case.

Shukan ST: May 5, 2000

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