Shepperd: The risks in the fog of war

Don Shepperd is a former U.S. Air Force major general and now a military analyst for CNN.

(CNN) -- Retired Maj. Gen. Don Shepperd, a CNN military analyst, talked Wednesday morning with CNN anchor Paula Zahn about what may have caused a 2,000-pound satellite-guided bomb from a B-52 to miss its target and kill three U.S. soldiers and five Afghan opposition fighters north of Kandahar, Afghanistan.

ZAHN: Those in the military sometimes talk about the fog of war. ... General, in the last hour you laid out some of the possibilities of what may have happened. Have you gotten any information from any of your sources that would help us better understand what went wrong?

SHEPPERD: Yes, a little bit more, Paula.

Let me set the stage for you, if I can. Here is a group of Special Forces soldiers under attack. Mortars, rockets perhaps, gunfire going around -- it's really, really loud. You're breathing hard and you want an air attack to attack those people that are shooting.

And here's what happens. The Special Forces soldiers have GPS, global position system receivers, that tell them their location. They stick their head up out of the foxhole. They use a laser-marking device to designate the target or the enemy positions. That then converts from where they are to the geographic location of the target.

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Those coordinates then are relayed either by telephone or by radio either through satellite or directly to the airplane. In this case, reportedly probably a B-52 overhead. When those coordinates get there, they then have to be typed into the JDAM, the Joint Direct Attack Munition, which is a satellite-guided weapon, and then the weapon has to hit the target.

You can see all of the things that can go wrong in this process. People under fire, mistakes that happen. It can fail mechanically at any portion along the way. And then, of course, in the end, the bomb itself can go errant. So there's a great deal that can go wrong to cause these accidents. It's a tragic, tragic accident.

ZAHN: And there really, sir, you're telling us this morning there's no way to prevent this from happening?

SHEPPERD: Well, there are ways to prevent it. In other words, you basically slow down. But when you come under fire, you take your chances and you hope nothing goes wrong.

We practice these things on many, many occasions. But in the fog and friction of war when the bullets are whizzing around you and mortars going off, and those of us who have been in this business have been there, it's really excruciating. You're trying to hurry to get firepower on the target. It used to take days, then we got it down to hours, it now takes minutes, but all of these things can go wrong either mechanically or physically or human error.

We're going to investigate this. It's on tapes, there's stuff in the computers in the airplanes. So we'll try to see what went wrong to try to prevent it in the future. But although this stuff looks easy, it's exceedingly dangerous and complex and things can go wrong and they just did tragically.

ZAHN: Gen. Shepperd, walk us inside the halls of the Pentagon now and the kinds of conversations that might be taking place. ... What is the immediate impact of the mistake and how it affects immediate bombings down the road here?

SHEPPERD: Very simply, Paula, we all understand the risk of this. This is our business. It is very, very dangerous, and we are well trained and our equipment is good. But the immediate reaction is not to stop the bombing, [it] is to find out what went wrong as rapidly as possible, make a quick assessment to see what went wrong to prevent it from happening tomorrow or the next day, but you will not be stopping bombing because this happened.

Now there's another dangerous situation in Tora Bora taking place where the opposition forces are reportedly racing to try to find bin Laden and al Qaeda and we are bombing in the same area. That's very dicey, and the same thing can happen in that area either with our own special operations forces or the opposition forces that are attacking. It's very dangerous, very complex and really risky.