WASHINGTON: Within weeks of the attacks on New York and the Pentagon last September, the Defence Threat Reduction Agency began working virtually around the clock to develop a powerful new bomb.

Their mission: come up with a device that could penetrate Al Qaeda’s cave complexes in the mountains of Afghanistan and kill the people inside.

By mid-December, the scientists were ready. In the Nevada desert, they detonated the world’s first “thermobaric” bomb.

Ten were quickly dispatched to US forces in Central Asia, and three weeks ago the first one was fired by an F-15E at a tunnel in eastern Afghanistan at the start of Operation Anaconda, the offensive against suspected Al Qaeda and Taliban holdouts.

The crash development of the weapon is just one example of how the war on terrorism is proving a potent laboratory for military innovation. Thirty new technologies, from armed aerial drones to dosimeters that measure exposure to toxic chemicals, have been rushed into use at home and abroad, the offspring of a 688 million dollars effort over the past eight years to stimulate innovation at the Pentagon.

Among the devices hurried into the development pipeline are foliage-penetrating radar sensors, micro-drones and microwave guns that stun, rather than maim or kill, officials say.

As the German blitzkrieg tactics or the American Manhattan project during World War II demonstrated, wars lead to military innovations that revolutionize how conflicts are fought.

Eight days after the Sept 11 attacks, Ronald Sega, who directs research and engineering at the Pentagon, called a dozen defence technology officials together to discuss what projects should be accelerated to support the impending war.

Sega said three emerged from a field of 150 projects: the thermobaric bomb; a bunker-busting, air-launched cruise missile; and a “nuclear quadrapole resonance” sensor to detect the presence of bulk explosive materials in trucks and shipping containers.

He said all three have been deployed, either in Afghanistan or the United States.

The thermobaric bomb resulted from a problem bedevilling Pentagon planners. Many Al Qaeda fighters were burrowed inside vast cave complexes in Afghanistan’s mountains. Short of a ground invasion to roust them cave by cave, getting at the terrorists was problematic.

The thermobaric bomb releases and then detonates a fine cloud of high-explosive chemicals, creating devastating shock waves that destroy everything — and everyone — inside a cave, bunker or building.

Only one has been dropped in Afghanistan. A problem with the laser-guidance system caused it to fall short of the cave entrance, negating its effectiveness, a defence official said.

In addition to the thermobaric bomb, the Afghan war will be remembered for its tactical advances — the fusion of Special Operations Forces spotting targets on the ground and long-range bombers firing at them from the air, for example. It’s also marked the first use of armed unmanned drones, with the CIA using surveillance Predators to launch Hellfire anti-tank missiles, and the first operational flight of the Global Hawk, an unmanned surveillance plane that flies higher and longer than the Predator.

Air Force officers working out of a special operational cell at the Pentagon called Checkmate figured out how to feed surveillance video from a Predator directly into an AC-130 gunship’s computers for real-time targeting.

Navy pilots flying EA-6B Prowlers off aircraft carriers found themselves playing a new role in jamming enemy ground communications. Army Special Forces troops devised new ways of communicating target coordinates to incoming fighter and bomber pilots.

The war has been a near-perfect laboratory, according to Michael Vickers, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a defence think tank. Vickers, a former Army officer and CIA operative, said the success came because the Al Qaeda network and the Taliban government sheltering it were overmatched.

“When great powers fight smaller wars ... you can experiment more because there’s no doubt you’re going to win,” he said.

In Afghanistan, Vickers drew a distinction between technical innovation, such as development of the thermobaric bomb, and what he considers even more important organizational and tactical innovation, such as linking Special Forces on the ground with bombers in the air.

“This was a new way of war, a new operational concept,” Vickers said. “And it was a pretty significant innovation, because we got fairly rapid regime change with it. This wasn’t on the shelf. This was the way we planned to overthrow governments.”

According to an Air Force case study documenting the fusion between soldiers and bombers, one lethal attack took place last fall after a commander with the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance asked US Special Forces troops to help him manoeuvre through a valley occupied by a large Taliban garrison.

Using a device called a Viper _ a portable laser range finder, digital map display and Global Positioning System receiver _ the soldiers calculated the coordinates of the Taliban garrison and troops and radioed them to the crew of a B-52 they’d requested. —Dawn/The Washington Post News Service.