The remarkably precise airstrikes rely on a battery of technology: the drone aircraft, 3-D satellite images, and increasingly small precision weapons guided by lasers or Global Positioning Systems.
"If it is a bad guy, a known terrorist, we can find him," says Lt. Col. Kenneth Edwards, another officer running the floor during my visit. "We watch them for a while. We determine a pattern of life and a positive identification," he says, peering through his glasses at a small image of a man on one of the screens. "Would you rather look in his window and possibly get killed, or would you rather look at him from afar?" he asks, referring to the danger of ground operations.
"On occasion, when there is just one guy in the middle of nowhere and we've got him, we will target that individual from the air," affirms Col. Gary Crowder, the commander of the operations center here.
What you hear from Air Force officers here is that Army Gen. David Petraeus' counterinsurgency strategy has been fully incorporated into the air war. That is, the U.S. is killing the bad guys -- but not civilians. All the technological prowess is key to that mission.
But are the efforts to limit collateral damage really working? When the Air Force has enough time to thoroughly plan a strike, the answer is yes, according to Marc Garlasco, who was the Pentagon's chief of high-value targeting at the start of the war in Iraq and is now a senior military analyst at Human Rights Watch. "When they have the time to plan things out and use all the collateral damage mitigation techniques and all the tools in their toolbox, they've gotten to the point where it is very rare for civilians to be harmed or killed in these attacks," Garlasco explains. But he emphasizes that it's still dicey when the Air Force has to drop bombs, in short order, to back up troops in a firefight. "When they have to do it on the fly and they are not able to use all these techniques, then civilians die."
Air Force officials admit they were stung by a series of headlines last summer about civilian deaths from airstrikes, particularly in Afghanistan. News reports from last June contained allegations of 90 civilian deaths from U.S. airstrikes over a 10-day period. Afghan President Hamid Karzai held a news conference that month, saying air operations had been "careless." On June 19, the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief, representing nearly 100 humanitarian groups, released a statement of "strong concern" about the death toll.
Since that time, Garlasco says, "I have not seen a single incident of civilian casualties in Afghanistan."
The Air Force learned the hard way that inadvertently killing and injuring civilians or damaging property is counterproductive to the overall cause. "We went back and looked at our procedures -- how we use air, why we use air and under what circumstances," explains Crowder. "We changed the way we do business."
"It's just like a business," agrees Maj. Gen. Maury Forsyth, the deputy commander of Air Force operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. "Every time you have one unsatisfied customer, you have to have nine satisfied customers to counteract that," he says during an interview in his office. "I'll put it this way: All of the military and political benefits of 10 perfect airstrikes targeting insurgent leaders can be lost in a few seconds by one strike that goes awry and causes civilian casualties."
The technology the Air Force relies on to kill Bubba, but not his neighbors, is mesmerizing. It also makes the process of killing another human being eerily impersonal.
On the floor, once Bubba is up on the screen, targeting officials can quickly call up satellite images of his location. They have at their fingertips high-fidelity images less than 90 days old of nearly every square foot of Iraq and Afghanistan -- a vast amount of data. By overlaying two images of the same location taken from separate angles, and donning a pair of gray 3-D glasses (I wore a pair), a stunning real-life-looking, 3-D image of Bubba's house appears on a computer screen: There is Bubba's yard, the tree in Bubba's yard and so on. Using a mouse to point and click, a computer quickly determines the size, height and precise location of nearby structures.
The Air Force uses the live images from the Predator drones to try to see if any innocent civilians are near a target. The 3-D satellite images are used to help identify and measure the precise distance to other nearby "collateral concerns" -- close-by buildings or any other thing they don't want to damage in an airstrike. "In Iraq, if it looks like we are going to kill a civilian by dropping a bomb, we don't drop a bomb," says Crowder.