Precision Guided Stupidity

ComNavOps has long decried the US (and, to be fair, the Western World) emphasis on precision guided munitions (PGM), believing that dependence on such weapons is a fool’s path (see, “Saturation Firepower”).  Why?  Because another word for precision guidance is expensive.  Because another word for precision guidance is scarce.  Because another word for precision guidance is unreliable.
 
ComNavOps, of course, is wise and knows all but how can the rest of the world be assured that ComNavOps is right?  The answer is by looking at the Ukraine-Russia war. 
 
Both sides have used precision guided weapons and what has it achieved?  Nothing. 
 
What has the US policy of supplying precision weapons to Ukraine demonstrated?  That in a real war we’ll run out of PGMs in short order and we lack the industrial capacity to replace them in any useful time frame.
 
The main weapon on both sides is dumb artillery with both sides expending tens of thousands of rounds per day, if reports can be believed.  That should be telling us something.
 
 
Conclusion
 
The conclusion is stunningly obvious:  we cannot wage a major war with PGMs as our main weapon.  If supplying Ukraine has depleted our PGM inventories and strained our industrial capacity beyond the ability to resupply in a useful time frame, how much worse will it be when we engage China?  We’ll expend ten thousand PGMs in the first week and then … we’ll be out of PGMs and China will be 99% unaffected.  What do we do then?
 
Our current production capacity for PGMs is something on the order of a hundred weapons per year per weapon type.  In a war, our expenditure rate will be something on the order of a hundred (or thousands or tens of thousands) weapons per day.  Do you see the gaping mismatch between expenditure and production?
 
We need weapons that can be produced at a rate of thousands per day (or more!) at an affordable cost.  You wage war with industrial capacity not a handful of PGMs.
 

Fool's Weapons

We need to end this worship of PGMs which are a weapon suited for the luxury of peacetime usage and production rates.  They are not a major war weapon.  Sure, I’ll gladly take any that are available but not at the expense of production rates and unaffordable costs.
 
ComNavOps is always cautioning about drawing lessons from Ukraine-Russia but this lesson is crystal clear.

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

Precision Guidance

Precision guidance - the miracle of modern warfare!  We’ll be able to fight a war with one hundredth or maybe one thousandth the number of munitions we used to use, right?.  The military has embraced precision guidance (PG) wholeheartedly and without taking even a second to examine the wartime usefulness of such munitions.  Heck, why would they?  We can pick which window of a building for a missile or bomb to fly into.  We can pick which vehicle in a convoy to hit.  We can blow up a building and leave the building next to it untouched.  What possible downside could there be to precision guidance aside from a little more production cost which more than pays for itself in all the munitions that don’t have to be used because we can do the job with just one?

How do we know all this?  How do we know it will work in a real war?  We know because we’ve been using PG munitions in real combat scenarios since Vietnam in the 1960’s and Desert Storm in 1991.

There’s just maybe one slight, tiny, miniscule concern, though – none of the combat uses over the ensuing decades has been against a peer opponent.  That shouldn’t matter though, should it?  There’s no difference between an A-6E circling over a target while laser guiding a bomb to its target and an F-15E or F-35 circling over its target while laser guiding a bomb to its target, is there?  Is there? 

Well, let’s think about that peer opponent concept.  Historically, we’ve had the luxury of being able to leisurely circle above targets to provide the necessary laser guidance.  Is that going to happen against a peer opponent?  Would we allow enemy planes to casually circle over our bases, troops, and facilities and provide precision guidance for bombs?  I don’t think so!  Historically, bombing runs have been single, high speed passes – no loitering.  How are we going to deliver laser guided bombs in a survivable manner?  If our planes can’t leisurely circle over a target without getting shot down, we may find that those laser guided bombs are nowhere near as useful as we’ve come to believe.

Of course, we’ve been talking about bombs that are guided by the aircraft.  The option also exists to provide laser spotting from the ground.  Again, though, this presupposes a fairly benign environment in which the spotter can set up, acquire his target, and provide the necessary spot for the required length of time.  Is this realistic in a peer ground combat scenario?  

For starters, a spotter is limited to very short ranges from the target.  The spotter has to approach the target quite closely on a relative scale (line of sight).  Either the spotter is going to be limited to those few (or many if we’re being overrun!) targets to the immediate front or he’s going to have to attempt to penetrate enemy lines to reach spotting positions for targets beyond his line of sight.  Can a spotter successfully penetrate large scale, peer, enemy infantry and armored units to reach the desired position?  How would the spotter even know where a desirable position is without pre-knowledge of the target?  The reality is that in high end, peer combat a spotter will be limited to the few targets immediately in front of him that he can visually see.  Further, most of those targets will be moving, fleeting, and small.  A single tank would be an example of a likely target.  It’s nice to take out a tank but that’s definitely not the kind of high value, lucrative target that precision guided munitions are intended for.

This is radically different from a spotter in Afghanistan sitting in a mountain oversight position and casually dealing with occasional groups of Taliban.

There’s also the issue of time.  It takes time to visually identify a worthwhile target, set up the spot, communicate and coordinate with a circling aircraft (there’s that peer survivability issue again – there won’t be any circling, waiting aircraft to call on), and actually execute the attack.  That kind of time is readily available against a few roving bands of terrorists but will it be available in high end, frenetic combat against peer opponents who are pushing hard against our positions?  It seems extremely unlikely.

We’ve been talking about dumb gravity bombs that have been provided guidance packages but there’s another class of precision guided weapons that are long range and much more sophisticated.  These include Tomahawks, JSOW, JDAM, JASSM, JWhatever, and the like.  These weapons have a few common characteristics.

• Their range allows the launching platform to stand off from the target and, to an extent, reduces the risk to the launching platform.
• They require precise targeting coordinates, typically, a combination of GPS and inertial guidance.
• They are expensive.

The cost precludes these weapons from area bombardment and limits them to individual targets.  However, those targets require exact coordinates and that raises an issue.  Who supplies the co-ordinates?  Where do the coordinates come from?  

We’ve grown used to UAVs leisurely circling an area and providing real time video and targeting data.  That’s simply not going to happen against a peer opponent.  Would we allow an enemy UAV to casually circle above us providing targeting data?  Of course not!  Why would we think a peer opponent will allow us to do that?  They won’t!  In short, we won’t have any survivable source of targeting data.  That B-2 bomber that has spent the last day flying all the way from some base in the US to launch long range, precision guided weapons is going to be asking for target coordinates and we won’t have any to give.

Yes, initially, we’ll have a list of known, fixed targets such as airfields, dockyards, factories, headquarters, etc. that can be readily targeted but attempting to support our forces with precision munitions in a fluid battle environment is going to be very difficult because none of the enemy forces will stay in one place long enough to establish coordinates, transmit the targeting data, coordinate the attack, and execute the attack.

The preceding discussion leads to one inexorable conclusion – on the active battlefield against a peer opponent, effective precision guidance will be limited to line of sight from the front lines – a hundred feet to a mile or two, depending on terrain, and then only against fixed targets or slowly moving targets (slow relative to the speed of the weapon).  Thus, small, portable anti-tank weapons (TOW and the like) will be effective because they can be rapidly employed against ‘fixed’ targets but 1000 lb guided bombs will be only marginally effective.

Consider this conceptual snippet of conversation between a ground unit under attack and a circling plane with a precision guided weapon attempting to help.

Infantry:  “Help!  We’re taking mortar fire.”

Aircraft:  “Give me the target coordinates.”

Infantry:  “I don’t have any coordinates!  It’s somewhere behind one of those hills in front of us.”

Aircraft:  “Without coordinates I can’t help you.  Call me when you have coordinates.”

The solution for this scenario is, of course, to call for artillery area bombardment and then, a couple of minutes later, the mortar no longer exists.

Without a doubt, precision guided weapons are useful and effective under the right circumstances.  But – and this is the big but – they will be nowhere near as useful as we’ve come to believe because we won’t be able to provide targeting to any useful extent on the active battlefield.

Here’s an example of the military’s misguided focus on precision munitions:

Wiki (“Sniper Advanced Targeting Pod”):  For target coordination with ground and air forces, a laser spot tracker, a laser marker, and an HDTV quality video down-link to ground-based controllers supports rapid target detection and identification.  –Seriously, does that sound like a rapid process to you?  Does it sound like a process that will stand up under peer combat?

Precision guided weapons are great for known, fixed location targets but are limited or nearly useless on the active battlefield.  This was always the inherent weakness with the Zumwalt (well, that and the million dollar projectile!).  It could only hit known, fixed targets and that’s not helpful for supporting engaged ground forces.

So far, we’ve been talking about geographical coordinate (GPS) and laser designation type targeting but there are other types of precision guidance such as electro-optical (EO) imaging and infrared (IR).  Those types of targeting do not require fixed geographical coordinates and can, to an extent, handle moving targets but they still require a reasonably accurate target fix prior to launch in order to avoid being wasted.

For example, EO guided weapons can be programmed to look for specific types of targets but unless the target location is known with a fair degree of assurance, the launch becomes an exercise in random chance and such weapons are too expensive to waste in such a fashion.  So, even EO/IR weapons suffer from the same targeting limitations on the active battlefield.

Targeting in high end, peer combat simply will not be readily available.  We’re going to find ourselves falling back on good, old fashioned, area bombardment weapons which are known as artillery.  Despite being able to anticipate this result, the US military is pouring most of its resources into ever more precise weapons and is downplaying the role of artillery.  We are not developing advanced artillery-delivered cluster munitions, thermobaric munitions, advanced self-propelled artillery, etc.

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Precision guidance factoids:

-Wiki (“Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor”):  “The F-22 can also carry air-to-surface weapons such as bombs with Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) guidance and the Small Diameter bomb, but cannot self-designate for laser-guided weapons.

-AAQ-14 LANTIRN Targeting Pod provides laser designation for the F-15E, F-16

-AAQ-33 Sniper Pod for F-15E and B-1B

-F-35 EOTS includes a laser designator