LESSONS RELEARNED. The November 2002 print edition of the Atlantic (not available online) includes Mark Bowden's report on the activities of the 391st Fighter Squadron in Afghanistan. There is one story, in which Army ground controllers working with the Northern Alliance, confronted a Taliban force with equal troop strength and tanks. The Northern Alliance troops were preparing to bug out, as it was a cloudy day, and no Northern Alliance armor to hand.

Then a Taliban tank exploded. A few minutes later, so did another. As, eventually, went all the Taliban armor on that field.

No, this is not an opportunity to marvel over U.S. technology. You have read your Tom Clancy, haven't you?

Rather, I want to direct your attention to this part of the story. The Army reports coordinates in degrees, minutes, and seconds. The Air Force uses degrees, minutes, and thousands of minutes. The smart bombs are therefore programmed in the latter. The interval between tank explosions was the time it took the weapons service officer in the plane to convert, using pencil, paper, and a Casio calculator watch to convert the Army's coordinate to Air Force coordinates. Once that calculation was completed, the Air Force advised the Army spotter to turn on his battery-powered laser, and then the bomb went.

We have been here before. Stephen Ambrose, in D-Day, notes that there was no "working method of communication between the soldiers on the ground with those eager-to-shoot P-38 pilots over their heads." That coordination was in place by December of 1944, and worked during the Ardennes battle.

The Washington Monthly, a frequent critic of interservice rivalry, does not appear to have picked up this story yet. Please advise me if I am in error.