A quarter of US bombs missed target in Afghan conflict

One in four bombs and missiles dropped by the US on Afghanistan may have missed its target, but the 75% success rate was higher than those achieved during the Kosovo and Gulf wars, according to the first assessments made by the American military.

More than 22,000 weapons - ranging from cruise missiles to heavy fuel-air bombs - have been dropped on the country over the past six months, similar to the number dropped during the 1999 Kosovo war and about a 10th of the amount used in the 1991 Gulf war.

Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, has described the Afghan war as the most accurate ever, with precision-guided weapons accounting for about 60% of all those dropped.

"With precision-guided weapons, you don't need to use as many bombs to achieve the desired effects, and using fewer weapons reduces the risk of collateral damage," a senior US navy officer involved in the bombing assessment study told the New York Times.

US pilots dropped more than 6,600 joint direct attack munitions (Jdam), the satellite-guided bombs that emerged as a favoured weapon in the Afghanistan campaign. Special forces, spy planes and Predator unmanned aircraft also enabled commanders to direct pilots quickly to targets on the ground.

However, precision bombs - so-called "smart" bombs - are much less effective against mobile and underground targets, as the recent Operation Anaconda in the mountains of south-eastern Afghanistan demonstrated.

The war has also shown that air power is not sufficient on its own and military analysts warn that Iraq, which has a sophisticated air defence system, would be a very different proposition.

"Afghanistan was a piece of cake from the access perspective," General Hal Hornburg, a veteran of the Gulf and Kosovo campaigns, who now heads the US air force air combat command, told the New York Times. "If we were to go to Iraq, we'd have a much more significant problem getting in and gaining air superiority than we did in Afghanistan," he warned.

Officials in the Pentagon warned that the Afghanistan assessment was preliminary and that bomb-damage data from pilots, satellites, reconnaissance aircraft and special forces on the ground were often unreliable and might inflate bombing claims, the newspaper said.

Claims about bombing successes were exaggerated in the Kosovo war when the RAF and US air force said after the conflict that they hit between 40% and 50% of targets.

In the Gulf war, the CIA and the US defence intelligence agency found that wartime damage assessments for Iraqi forces in Kuwait were at least 30% too high.