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We Can’t Always Count On Smart Bombs: CSBA « Breaking Defense – Defense industry news, analysis and commentary

Washington’s gotten used to war on easy mode. Policymakers may debate the strategic value of air campaigns in places like Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, but they assume the smart bombs will hit their targets. One bomb, one target, one boom. That assumption is no longer safe, says a new study from the influential Center for…

Washington’s gotten used to war on easy mode. Policymakers may debate the strategic value of air campaigns in places like Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, but they assume the smart bombs will hit their targets. One bomb, one target, one boom.

That assumption is no longer safe, says a new study from the influential Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. (CSBA gave us a copy in advance). Countermeasures are growing more sophisticated and more common. Advanced anti-aircraft missiles can snipe a single smart bomb out of the sky, let alone the US aircraft carrying it. Jammers can scramble radar and GPS. Lasers and high-powered microwaves are becoming practical weapons against incoming missiles. So the smart bomb won’t always get through.

Worse, as the odds of any single weapon hitting go down, the number of weapons required to assure a hit goes up exponentially, say CSBA authors Mark Gunzinger and Bryan Clark. If the enemy can’t stop your weapons, you need to send just one to have 95 percent confidence of hitting any given target. But if the enemy can stop a significant fraction of your smart bombs, say 20 percent, you need to send two to achieve that same 95 percent confidence. If your weapons have only a 50-50 chance, you need to send five. Against a major adversary, like Iran or (in the nightmare scenario) China, we might run out of weapons well before we run out of targets.

via We Can’t Always Count On Smart Bombs: CSBA « Breaking Defense – Defense industry news, analysis and commentary.

Of course, Tom Clancy was writing about this in 1994’s Debt of Honor. And it has been a real issue for some time now.

Of course, in any air campaign against a near peer, the first step wil be to disintegrate any integrated air defenses. Once that has been done, the odds of any given weapon being successful go right back up.

And while a shortage of smart weapons in any conflict is a real issue, don’t forget that it is a two way sword. The enemy can’t afford to shoot down every single HARM or JSOW or MALD thrown its way.

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  1. Pave Low John

    One of the most chilling things I ever saw when I worked in the CAOC in Qatar was a live Predator feed of a JDAM strike that went wrong. We never figured out what caused it, but about halfway to the target, this 2000-lb GPS guided bomb decided that the middle of a town 2 miles away looked much more inviting than the isolated farm house that the AQ cell leader was hiding in. When the Predator sensor operator zoomed out, you could see the huge column of smoke billowing up from this neighborhood. Simply awful, but that’s the harsh reality of combat air operations.

      Collateral damage can be reduced but never eliminated.  That is why war is such a terrible thing, especially for the civilians caught in the middle.  Anyone that thinks Predators, precision-guided munitions or expanded ROEs can change that are fooling themselves.

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  2. HalfEmpty

    As we say at Rantburg (cough) arclite.
    Now drink up.

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  3. diogenesofnj

    May have been the wrong target, but I bet more enemy were killed in that strike than would have been killed at the proper target. When an enemy hides among the civilian population this kind of collateral damage is bound to happen. Blame the enemy and the civilians that provide cover (they are not entirely innocent – I don’t believe that bilge anymore). If no Americans were killed, then I’m not all that upset.

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  4. Jjak

    Have to read the full report, but NOT mentioned in the article is that most of our allies are also mostly reliant on our smart bomb stockpile and industry, and they are even worse at maintaining a war reserve than we are.

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  5. Tarl

    The enemy can’t afford to shoot down every single HARM or JSOW or MALD thrown its way.

    Sure they can. That is where point defense guns like the SA-22 come into play.

    http://www.ausairpower.net/APA-Rus-PLA-PD-SAM.html

    With the end of the Cold War came the Desert Storm campaign, followed by US air campaigns against Serbia in 1999 and Iraq in 2003. All three of these campaigns saw the massed use of Precision Guided Munitions (PGM), more than often from standoff ranges.

    Russian planners identified the PGM as the primary risk to their fixed and ground force installations, and pursued further evolution of the SA-15 and SA-19 to defeat this threat.

    The latest Pantsir S1 / SA-22 Greyhound and Tor M2 / SA-15 Gauntlet systems are equipped with phased array engagement radars, very fast SAMs, and are designed to rapidly react to incoming PGMs and destroy them before they hit their targets. In a fundamental sense, Russia’s designers have followed much the same path as Western naval air defence artitects have, reacting to late Cold War and subsequent anti-shipping missile capabilities. The problem is much the same.

    From a force structure planning perspective, such point defence systems will over time render non-stealthy subsonic PGMs irrelevant, as these will be easily tracked and engaged. The future lies in PGMs which are stealthier and faster than existing designs.

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  6. LT Rusty

    but … but … guns aren’t transformational!!! They’re low tech!!! They can’t possibly be relevant!!!

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