KOHAT, Oct 9: In view of the immense similarity between the map of the targets (the terrain and the structure of buildings) in Afghanistan and the adjoining Pakistani tribal areas which are fed in the memory of the Tomahawk Cruise Missile the defence officials have declared territory within the 100 miles air radius from the border as vulnerable, a highly placed military source told Dawn on Tuesday.

The tomahawk cruise missiles with a speed of 880 Km/h and firing range of 1000 miles hit some border areas of Pakistan in the 1998 attack on Afghanistan was the result of the same problem otherwise these missiles were the choice weapon of the US military for their accuracy and destruction. The target (building) and the terrain to be travelled by the cruises fed in the 3-D map stored in its memory were identical to the structure of buildings in the tribal area therefore some of the missiles fell inside Pakistan.

There were no very sophisticated structures in the war-torn Afghanistan for training camps and were similar to the mud houses in the same terrain in Balochistan and tribal areas of the North West Frontier Province, he explained.

He disclosed that for that reason the Pakistani and US military officials had worked more on identifying the specific targets and their distance from the launching location to get accurate results. However, there is not much difference between the terrain near the cities and the unpopulated areas inside Afghanistan, the difficulty faced by the US forces to achieve their goal in shortest possible time, the sources further said.

So far the US led forces have used estimated worth $100 million cruise missiles only, apart from the expenditure on the movement of submarines, aircraft carriers and planning of attacks.

The reports received here suggested that these missiles were being launched from the submarines in the Arabian sea however the B-52 bombers which were taking part in the operation were also capable to launch them.

About the Cruise missile he said, IGS — Inertial Guidance System, a standard acceleration-based system that can roughly keep track of where the missile is based on the accelerations detects in the missile’s motion. The Terrain Contour Matching (Tercom) uses an on-board 3-D database of the terrain the missile will be flying over.

The Tercom system locates the terrain it is flying over using its radar system and matches this to the 3-D map stored in memory. The Tercom system is responsible for a cruise missile’s ability to dive during flight and hits its target with the help of DSMAC - Digital Scene Matching Area Correlation.