(2004-12-07) Gladwell Picture Perfect

Malcolm Gladwell on the dangers of treating a Photo Graph as a perfect Model. Mammo Gram-s/HealthCare and Munition-s. Colin Powell/War On Iraq, Scud Missile-s/First-GulfWar.

• Thus was victory declared in the Scud hunt - until hostilities ended and the Air Force appointed a team to determine the effectiveness of the air campaigns in Desert Storm. The actual number of definite Scud kills, the team said, was zero.

• But the American military believed that the problem of bombing accuracy was solvable, and a big part of the solution was something called the Norden bombsight. This breakthrough was the work of a solitary, cantankerous Genius named Carl Norden, who operated out of a factory in New York City. Norden built a fifty-pound mechanical computer called the Mark XV, which used gears and wheels and gyroscopes to calculate airspeed, altitude, and crosswinds in order to determine the correct bomb-release point. The Mark XV, Norden's business partner boasted, could put a bomb in a pickle barrel from twenty thousand feet. The United States spent $1.5 billion developing it, which, as Budiansky points out, was more than half the amount that was spent building the atomic bomb.