Louis is a city that works for Boeing, making fighter planes and smart bombs, and for Anheuser-Busch, making beer.

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Beguiled by technology, they may perhaps believe that smart bombs and Tomahawk missiles can nowadays win military victories without the help of foot soldiers.

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They watched in awe on live television as U.S. forces used cruise missiles, smart bombs and stealth bombers to inflict swift and devastating blows on enemy forces.

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The advent of GPS-guided smart bombs has made all of the bombers in the fleet, even the venerable B-52, more lethal than earlier generations of aviators could have imagined.

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The Scranton area contains several sizable defense plants making items like high-tech helmets and smart bombs, and the biggest local employer is a nearby Army depot that repairs military electronics.

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Even as drug companies show data on dozens of medicines that target weak spots in cancer like smart bombs, what would have been lauded as miracles are now de rigueur.

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But the Air Force then calculated that a payload of thirty-two smart bombs, each weighing two thousand pounds, would be required to penetrate thirty feet below ground, insuring that any bunkers would collapse.

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Every new military technology that came along, from stealthy airframes to smart bombs to digital data links, seemed to demonstrate that future wars would be won in the skies above rather than on the ground below.

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For example, one company widely mentioned as a potential target of activists is Textron, the Providence, Rhode Island-based industrial conglomerate that builds everything from the V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor to smart cluster bombs.

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