What the Dog Saw [88]
The problem was not, as in the case of the Scud hunt, that the target could not be found, or that what was thought to be the target was actually something else. The B-17s, aided by their Norden Mark XVs, hit the ball-bearing factories hard. The problem was that the picture Air Force officers had of their target didn’t tell them what they really needed to know. The Germans, it emerged, had ample stockpiles of ball bearings. They also had no difficulty increasing their imports from Sweden and Switzerland, and, through a few simple design changes, they were able to greatly reduce their need for ball bearings in aircraft production. What’s more, although the factory buildings were badly damaged by the bombing, the machinery inside wasn’t. Ball-bearing equipment turned out to be surprisingly hardy. “As it was, not a tank, plane, or other piece of weaponry failed to be produced because of lack of ball bearings,” Albert Speer, the Nazi production chief, wrote after the war. Seeing a problem and understanding it, then, are two different things.
In recent years, with the rise of highly accurate long-distance weaponry, the Schweinfurt problem has become even more acute. If you can aim at and hit the kitchen at the back of a house, after all, you don’t have to bomb the whole building. So your bomb can be two hundred pounds rather than a thousand. That means, in turn, that you can fit five times as many bombs on a single plane and hit five times as many targets in a single sortie, which sounds good — except that now you need to get intelligence on five times as many targets. And that intelligence has to be five times more specific, because if the target is in the bedroom and not the kitchen, you’ve missed him.
This is the issue that the US command faced in the most recent Iraq war. Early in the campaign, the military mounted a series of air strikes against specific targets, where Saddam Hussein or other senior Baathist officials were thought to be hiding. There were fifty of these so-called decapitation attempts, each taking advantage of the fact that modern-day GPS-guided bombs can be delivered from a fighter to within thirteen meters of their intended target. The strikes were dazzling in their precision. In one case, a restaurant was leveled. In another, a bomb burrowed down into a basement. But, in the end, every single strike failed. “The issue isn’t accuracy,” Watts, who has written extensively on the limitations of high-tech weaponry, says. “The issue is the quality of targeting information. The amount of information we need has gone up an order of magnitude or two in the last decade.”
5.
Mammography has a Schweinfurt problem as well. Nowhere is that more evident than in the case of the breast lesion known as ductal carcinoma in situ, or DCIS, which shows up as a cluster of calcifications inside the ducts that carry milk to the nipple. It’s a tumor that hasn’t spread beyond those ducts, and it is so tiny that without mammography few women with DCIS would ever know they have it. In the past couple