The pursuit of the perfect precision weapon — one that can strike smack-dab into a pickup truck speeding down an alley — may have gone too far, said a senior Air Force official.
Since the early days of the counterinsurgency war in Iraq, the Air Force has shifted considerable funding and attention to improving its arsenal of high-tech smart munitions so they can be more useful in urban areas. Most of the precision-guided bombs the Air Force buys weigh 1,000 pounds to 2,000 pounds — so large that they cannot be dropped in populated cities without killing large numbers of civilians. The Air Force has a 250-pound “small diameter bomb,” which recently was shipped to units in Iraq. All these weapons were designed to hit fixed installations and require precise data of the target location.
Most recently, the Air Force began developing a more advanced version of the small diameter bomb — to be equipped with an advanced “multimode seeker” that pinpoints moving targets more precisely than any weapon ever has. It also will have a “data link” so the weapon can be retargeted in flight.
The Air Force, however, has to be careful about devoting too much attention and resources to designing new weapons for missions that could be accomplished by other means, said Gen. Ronald E. Keys, head of the Air Combat Command.
Further, the Air Force should not assume that urban counterinsurgency is the only game for which it has to be ready to play, Keys said.
“Everyone is worried about moving targets,” Keys said. But nobody really knows “how many moving targets out there need to be attacked every day.”
In Iraq, particularly, “we are spending a lot of time trying to find that one white SUV,” he said, referring to insurgents’ vehicles. “Do a few get away? Probably.” The question the Air Force must address is whether pouring money into a new version of the small diameter bomb is really cost effective, considering that the same job could be done by other weapons.
The cost of weapons should matter to the Air Force at a time when budgets are shrinking. “I’m barely at the point where I can afford meat and potatoes. Dessert may be off the table.”
Expensive “Gucci” weapons are not always the answer, Keys said. “I don’t think it’s going to be any great step for SDB II [the next generation of the small diameter bomb] to attack moving targets,” he said. “Unless the weather is really bad, I can strafe them, I can lead them with a laser-guided bomb, GPS bombs, Hellfire missiles.”
Hunting targets successfully in Iraq requires not just high-tech weapons, but also the ability to collect data from ground operators and display target locations accurately. “A lot of the shortfalls we have are because the information is not integrated, not displayed,” said Keys. In this conflict, “training is more important to solve immediate problems.”
In the future, the Iraq scenario may not repeat itself, so the Air Force should not just build new weapons for urban guerilla warfare.
“Iraq and Afghanistan are not the only wars in the world,” said Keys. “The next war is not going to be like phase four in Iraq. When you get to Korea, your problem is going to be 1,000 tubes of artillery. Finding targets is not going to be your problem; it’s going to be hitting them. And you won’t need that sophisticated precision.”
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