Targets and Weapons - Mismatch?

The firepower rage in the US military is precision guided weapons (PGM).  It’s almost a religion.  Every target needs a PGM, the military would have us believe.  We’ve all but abandoned dumb bombs and area weapons.  Is this wise?  Let’s consider the type of targets we’ll encounter in war and peace and the types of weapons they require.

Broadly, there are two categories of targets:

Targets you can see – These are targets that can be sensed by some targeting-capable sensor.  This could be radar, optical, IR, or whatever.  The obvious caveat, here, is that the sensor has to be within sensing range of the target.  Those tanks that we know are moving around, exposed, somewhere in the enemy’s deep rear area may be ‘seeable’ but if we can’t get a sensor in range then they’re unseen, at least temporarily.

In a war, seeable targets will include fixed facilities such as buildings, factories, air bases, ports, missile silos, roads, bridges, and the like.  The notable feature of such targets is that most are far from the site of actual battles.  They tend to be more infrastructure and combat support facilities.  The remaining targets such as ships, aircraft, troops, vehicles, artillery, etc. will come and go – they’ll be seeable for brief periods and then vanish.  The challenge is to get a sensor and a weapon on them during the period they’re visible.

Targets you can’t see – No smart enemy is going to obligingly line up their forces out in the open for us to systematically destroy.  Instead, they’re going to hide their forces from our sensors as best they can.  This may include disguising targets, burying them, camouflaging them, using obscurants, etc.  Alternatively, making a target unseeable can also include destroying our sensors.  Again, we know there’s tanks moving around somewhere in front of us but all our targeting UAVs keep getting shot down before we can get actionable targeting data.

Let’s consider the characteristics of the two categories as they relate to weapon selection.

Targets you can see – If you can see the target then any weapon is a potentially viable choice and the specific selection will be decided on the basis of weapon availability, target ‘hardness’, range, etc.  In other words, the entire arsenal of weapons is possible and selection depends on fairly obvious factors.  This is where PGMs are useful and effective.

Cost, however, is a notable factor.  Using a multi-million dollar missile to destroy a thousand dollar mortar (I don’t know what mortars cost but this illustrates the concept) is not cost effective. 

Targets you can’t see – It is still possible to successfully engage targets you can’t see.  It’s called area bombardment.  If you place enough explosives in an area, you are statistically certain to kill troops and destroy equipment even if you can’t see them.  The important point, here, is that many/most of the weapons used in area bombardment will not hit anything.  While any weapon can be used for this, the obvious caveat is that PGMs are far too expensive and cost ineffective to be used in area bombardment.

Now, let’s take a graphical look at our target and weapon sets.

In the first graphic, shown below, we see a plot of the visibility of targets versus the likelihood of occurrence.

What this is telling us is that the most visible targets are the least likely (numerous) and, conversely, the most likely (numerous) targets are the least visible.  This is just common sense and is a graphical way of saying that the enemy is going to hide his assets in whatever manner he can.  This is not exactly a stunning revelation and yet so many military professionals seem to think the reverse will be true – that we’ll see and be able to target almost all the enemy’s assets.  Nothing could be further from the truth!

In the next graph, below, we see, simply, that unguided area bombardment weapons (effective area shown in yellow) are effective against ALL targets regardless of their visibility, or not.  Again, nothing new about this.

Finally, in the next graph, we see the subset of targets that PGMs are suited for (area in green).

As we see, PGMs are suited only for a small portion of the target set and yet, bizarrely, most of our weapon development and procurement is focused on PGMs.  We are most focused on the weapons that have the least general applicability!  Strange, isn’t it?

This is not to say that PGMs are not useful.  Of course they are!  The problem is that they are hideously expensive which leads to small inventories and they are of limited applicability.

Consider the Israeli situation.  They have access to PGMs in their fight against Palestine/Hamas/Hezbollah and yet their main problem is that they can’t find any targets to use their weapons against.  Since they’ve opted not to use area bombardment, they’ve created a situation for themselves in which their military is almost ineffective as witnessed by the fact that they keep fighting the same war over and over.

As we ponder what we’ve just learned, let’s take a glance at this table of typical weapons with cost and estimated inventories listed.  As you look at it, relate the costs and inventories to the target sets.

Weapon	Unit Cost	Inventorya
PGM Weapons:
Tomahawk	$2,000,000(1)	3,000
LRASM, AGM-158C	$3,500,000(1)	0
Hellfire, AGM-114	$45,000(1)	0
NSM (Naval Strike Missile)	$1,200,000(2)	200
ATACMS	$800,000(3)	1,000
JDAM Guidance Package	$22,000(1)	2,000
Small Diameter Bomb, GBU-53	$221,000(1)	3,000
Area Weapons:
5” Mk187 Mod 0 Shell	$4,631(6)	30,000
500 lb General Purpose Bomb, BLU-111	$6,000(4)	10,000
Unguided rockets, all types	$2,342(5)	10,000

^a Inventory numbers are my own slightly semi-informed guesstimates based on monitoring yearly purchases over time.  They should be used as indicative of relative numbers rather than actual inventory quantities.

Our weapons are out of alignment with our target sets, budgets, and inventories.  We need to correct this imbalance by recalling the value of area weapons.  We need to refocus our research and development efforts and start seriously improving our area weapons. 

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(1)The Drive website, “Here Is What Each Of The Pentagon's Air-Launched Missiles And Bombs Actually Cost”, Joseph Trevithick, 18-Feb-2020,

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/32277/here-is-what-each-of-the-pentagons-air-launched-missiles-and-bombs-actually-cost

(2)Wikipedia, “Naval Strike Missile”, retrieved 3-May-2020,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Strike_Missile

(3)Breaking Defense website, “Marines Seek Anti-Ship HIMARS: High Cost, Hard Mission ”, Sydney J Freedberg, Jr., 14-Nov-2017,

https://breakingdefense.com/2017/11/marines-seek-anti-ship-himars-high-cost-hard-mission/

(4)Department of Defense FY2020 Budget Estimates, Procurement of Ammo, Navy & MC, page vol 1-8, eyeball average of several similar entries,

https://www.secnav.navy.mil/fmc/fmb/Documents/20pres/PANMC_BOOK.pdf

(5)Department of Defense FY2020 Budget Estimates, Procurement of Ammo, Navy & MC, page vol 1-40, cost of rocket hardware (body) and HE warhead,

https://www.secnav.navy.mil/fmc/fmb/Documents/20pres/PANMC_BOOK.pdf

(6)Department of Defense FY2020 Budget Estimates, Procurement of Ammo, Navy & MC, page vol 1-119, total of propellant charge plus projectile

https://www.secnav.navy.mil/fmc/fmb/Documents/20pres/PANMC_BOOK.pdf