Watch Ritter Spin

Scott Ritter's new piece in the Christian Science Monitor, "Iraq sarin shell is not part of a secret cache", probably answers a lot of questions - if you don't think about it too much.

Ritter, who was in intelligence officer with a Marine artillery battalion during his time in the Corps, says:

I would often find myself deployed in the field, on exercises where thousands of live artillery rounds were fired downrange.
In keeping with the Marine artillery motto of "shoot, move, communicate," we were always moving from one firing location to another to simulate modern war.

Let's stop right here.

Note the scenario carefully: Ritter was an intelligence officer for an artillery unit - probably a First Lieutenant. His job was trying to figure out where enemy targets were.

He goes on to describe some things that he learned in that job. Note them carefully - we'll come back to them:

This mobility had us often passing through live-fire impact areas. One thing you quickly learned was not to touch anything lying on the ground, because modern artillery shells had a high "dud" rate, meaning they didn't always function the way they were intended. Tens of thousands of these "duds" were scattered across the desert terrain, not unlike those found in Iraq.

Seems sensible enough to me - after any major war, the danger of unexploded ordnance is always a huge problem; they're still uncovering live bombs from World War II in London and Berlin.

But remember - he's talking about live fire training for a combat unit.

Not ordnance and munitions testing. The difference, as I hope you'll see below, is crucial.

In the next section Ritter - the last two years of whose life has been an exercise in steering his arguments into the logical weeds - steers into the logical, er, weeds.

The key to whether the sarin artillery round came from an arms cache or was a derelict dud rests in the physical characteristics of the shell. The artillery shells in question were fitted with two aluminum cannisters separated by a rupture disk. The two precursor chemicals for the kind of sarin associated with this shell were stored separately in these containers. The thrust of the shell being fired was designed to cause the liquid in the forward cannister to press back and break the rupture disk, whereupon the rotation of the shell as it headed downrange would mix the two precursors together, creating sarin. Upon impact with the ground - or in the air, if a timed fuse was used - a burster charge would break the shell, releasing the sarin gas.

Many things go wrong when firing an artillery round: the propellent charge can be faulty, resulting in a round that doesn't reach its target; the fuse can malfunction, preventing the burster charge from going off, leaving the round intact; the rupture disk can fail to burst, keeping precursor chemicals from combining. The fuse could break off on impact, leaving the fuse cavity empty. To the untrained eye, the artillery shell, if found in this state, would look weathered, but unfired.

What gives away whether the shell had been fired is the base-bleed charge, which unlike the rest of the shell, will show evidence of being fired (or not). Iraq declared that it had produced 170 of these base-bleed sarin artillery shells as part of a research and development program that never led to production. Ten of these shells were tested using inert fill - oil and colored water. Ten others were tested in simulated firing using the sarin precursors. And 150 of these shells, filled with sarin precursors, were live-fired at an artillery range south of Baghdad. A 10 percent dud rate among artillery shells isn't unheard of - and even greater percentages can occur. So there's a good possibility that at least 15 of these sarin artillery shells failed and lie forgotten in the Iraq desert, waiting to be picked up by any unsuspecting insurgent looking for raw material from which to construct an IED.

Given what's known about sarin shells, the US could be expected to offer a careful recital of the data with news of the shell. But facts that should have accompanied the story - the type of shell, its condition, whether it had been fired previously, and the age and viability of the sarin and precursor chemicals - were absent.

Emphasis added.

So the media - most of whose members can't tell the difference between an F-16 and an M-16 - didn't report the condition of the base bleed plugs on a shell - when most of them doing know the difference between a breechblock and an ogive, or a barrel and a barrel liner. A component of a shell - a specialized component of a very specialized shell, at that. This on a shell that, by the way, exploded, at least partially.

On this basis, Ritter declares the notion of a stockpile dead.

Ritter also notes that the 150 rounds fired were test rounds containing live precursors. Unanswered by Ritter:

• Would the test rounds have had live base bleed charges? Or would the charges have been armed had the shells indeed been testing prototypes, as Ritter himself claims they were?
• Since the shells involved were prototypes, and were being fired to test the functioning of the rounds, wouldn't the crew at the test range have attempted to have recovered any "dud" rounds? And if a test round were unrecoverable by a test range crew in peacetime under controlled test conditions (and isn't it reasonable to think that a small quantity of prototype rounds would be fired under such conditions), how would such a round magically bubble to the surface for a group of untrained thugs?
• In any case, isn't it misleading for Ritter to compare an ordnance test to the type of live-firing exercise that he describes at the beginning of the piece?

I have no answers for these questions - but Ritter doesn't offer any, either. For him to declare the idea of a WMD stockpile dead based on the existence of a shell and no apparentl knowledge of the shell or its condition seems like, at the very least, faulty logic - and at worst, another attempt to create yet another piece of media spin to influence the uninformed.

Posted by Mitch at May 21, 2004 01:47 PM