UXO & Libya: The Questions Summoned By Each New Case.

Sunday, December 18 2011

UXO & Libya: The Questions Summoned By Each New Case.

Our recent work in the NYT on loose arms, unexploded ordnance and errant air strikes in Libya resulted in the repeated filling my Twitter DM file and my email accounts with tips and helpful comments.

Among the many interesting items are the photo above, and the two images immediately below. These came in earlier today from Etienne de Malglaive, a photographer who lives in France and covered the Libyan war. (To see a fine selection of Etienne’s work, go here.) Etienne is one of the photographers whose eye was drawn to loose weapons, and when he came across this large piece of unexploded ordnance, or UXO, he stopped to make a record.

Here’s some of the background.

Etienne was with anti-Qaddafi fighters as they rushed toward Tripoli in the late summer, while the government of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi was crumbling. In Zawiyah he encountered quite a scene. A building had been hit by ordnance from a NATO warplane, but upon striking its target the bomb, as is more common than many of you might expect, failed to explode.

To get your bearings, have a look at the image above, which Etienne tells us is from

Google Map, downtown Zawiyah, east side of central park, impact on the facade marked with red spot, building encircled.

Now let’s have a look at that building from the ground view, in this case from another of Etienne’s photos, this one taken from the city’s central park. The bomb, Etienne said, had passed through the facade of the building, within the red circle.

The ordnance penetrated the structure, shedding its fins and guidance system, before it came to rest where the image at the top of this post showed it.

I had a hunch at what this was, and when I shared the photo with an experienced EOD hand a short while ago, he offered the same quick read: this appears to be a 500-pound MK 82 bomb, the high-explosive component of a laser-guided GBU-12, which was one of the more common air-to-ground weapons used by NATO in its seven-month campaign.

Basically, as a way of updating of an old weapon, the MK 82 is outfitted with a guidance package that converts it from a so-called “dumb bomb” to a so-called “smart bomb.”

So why doesn’t this bomb in Etienne’s photograph look high-tech? Because when one of these co-called “smart bombs” strikes earth (or a building) and does not explode, the guidance system tends to be sheared off and to scatter. This big metal sausage, alone by itself, is, in its way, a familiar sight. (Another pic of a similar dud near Brega, published today, can be found here.) A search of the area in Zawiyah probably would have found more of the components (cf, the pics below, near bottom of this post), but Etienne had a lot going on that day and didn’t have time for the fuller examination.

I went in the room and saw the entrance hole on the ceiling as the bomb came in from the floor above, through the facade.

After shooting the bomb (on doing so I inadvertently interrupted two looters banging a vault with hammers and they ran away seeing me…) I called a thuwar patrol on the street [NOTE: “thuwar” = anti-Qaddafi fighter] and led them inside the building to the bomb so they can eventually send a disposal team or seal the building.

Tripoli was changing hands, and Etienne pushed on.

He did the right thing to notify what passed then for Zawiya’s authorities. But now it is worth circulating his photos both as a reminder of the potential dangers of UXO and of the one-time location of a particularly large weapon. Hopefully this piece of UXO was appropriately cleared long ago, but, if not, then Etienne has provided a useful map for the organizations on ground, like Mines Advisory Group and the Joint Mine Action Coordination Team, that are trying to make post-conflict Libya safer.

As for remnants of precision-guided munitions, here are some of the signature items these weapons leave behind, and which can be gathered by scouring craters and doing clover-leaf or expanding-square walks around impact sites. These scraps, below, came from a NATO strike in Misurata (which I have not written about) or from the strikes in Majer covered in today’s NYT.

Noticing and gathering such pieces and being able to identify them is an important skill for establishing ownership of particular acts of violence, and also for identifying what type of weapon, in the cases of UXO, might be beneath the soil or wedged within a building where an entry hole is found, but no explosion occurred.

Many people write me to tell me how interesting all of this must be. I suppose it is. But let’s also be clear: this kind of exercise would be less necessary if air forces, whether they fly under NATO command or otherwise, would capture data on duds and share it with people who live in areas that have been bombed. Modern targeting pods make it possible for these air forces to know, bomb by bomb, which weapons did not explode — and where. In Libya, where foreign intervention was internationally justified under a mandate to protect civilians, NATO as yet has not shared this kind of data. An argument could be made that in a campaign justified by R2P, its swift and thorough release would fall neatly within the principle of the mission.

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHS

TOP: By Etienne de Malglaive. SECOND FROM TOP: Google Earth image, marked up by Etienne. THIRD FROM TOP: By Etienne, also marked up. BOTTOM THREE: By the author. All from Libya, 2011.

(With gratitude to Etienne.)