FEATURE ARTICLE

July 2005

Urban Fighting Highlights Need for Smaller Weapons

By Sandra I. Erwin

The U.S. military services spend billions of dollars on precision-guided bombs, missiles and artillery shells, which, for the most part, have proven inadequate for urban fighting in Iraqi cities.

The problem, military commanders contend, is that most of the munitions that fighter jets and bombers deliver are too large and too destructive to be effective in a war where the goal is to neutralize isolated pockets of insurgents without killing friendly troops and innocent civilians.

Ground-based artillery also has limited use—it delivers too much firepower and rounds often miss the target.

In the urban firefights in Iraq, the most useful and precise weapon is a street-savvy sniper, said Army Maj. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, commander of the 1st Cavalry Division.

The division spent more than a year in Baghdad, and battled insurgents in some of the poorest and most violent sections of the city. Chiarelli, like other commanders in Iraq, found that close-air support has limited use when the intent is to bring down suspected terrorists scurrying down alleys and darting into buildings.

“Counter-fire in the city was a no-go for me,” Chiarelli told an industry conference hosted by the U.S. Joint Forces Command. The insurgents, he said, “were never there when we returned fire … So we used pattern analysis and snipers instead.”

Similarly, Navy pilots launching air strikes from carriers in the Persian Gulf found that most of their missiles and bombs were not suitable for close-air support in tight urban quarters.

Even the smallest precision-guided bomb now available in the fleet—the 500-pound JDAM (joint direct attack munition)—is too big for many types of close-air support missions and puts friendly troops at risk, said Navy Capt. Mark Guadagnini, who commanded Carrier Air Wing 17 aboard the USS John F. Kennedy.

The Kennedy returned in December 2004 from a six-month deployment in the Gulf. The air wing’s primary duties were close-air support operations over Iraq. Pilots provided air cover to U.S. soldiers and Marines who were fighting insurgents entrenched in crowded cities. “Targets were in close proximity to our ground forces,” said Guadagnini. “Of the 78 bombs we dropped, 60 percent were in a close-air support role.”

Air strikes, even with 500-pound JDAMs, put civilians at risk, Guadagnini told a conference of the Precision Strike Association.

“At times, we couldn’t even use a 500-pound JDAM, and we had to get down and strafe from 800 feet, right in the eyeballs of the bad guys, because our forces were too close to drop any of the weapons we have, with the possible exception of 2.75-inch rockets or guns,” he explained.

In response to feedback from the fleet, Pentagon planners are trying to decide how best to satisfy operators’ needs.

“We can see that GPS (Global Positioning System) is only getting us so far, despite the success of JDAM,” said Marine Lt. Col. Chris St. George, who oversees equipment requirements at the office of the director of naval warfare.

“The only reason JDAM has been successful in close-air support is because we have so much data we have captured in the past couple of years” in the form of precise coordinates of every major city in Iraq, St. George said. The upshot is that commanders tend to limit the use of JDAM to areas for which the U.S. military has a database of geographic coordinates, he added. If pilots are called to support ground troops in an area for which no database exists, they most likely will not employ JDAM because it takes too long to get coordinates. “That’s not helpful in a close-air support environment,” where ground troops are under fire and need immediate assistance, said St. George.

Laser-guided weapons often are the preferred choice in these operations, but they require a direct line of sight to the target, which can often be obstructed by bad weather, smoke or buildings.

The Navy is considering buying laser-guided JDAMs, said Navy Capt. David Dunaway, program manager for precision-guided munitions. The challenges of operating in Iraq have fueled the demand for more capable technologies, he said. “You spend days tracking insurgents in the streets of Fallujah; you want the ordnance at the right opportunity,” Dunaway told contractors at the conference. “There is a future in making systems much more reliable.” Getting through the Pentagon’s bureaucracy, however, is likely to slow down any efforts to develop new systems, he said. “The biggest impediment I see is decision making, not technology.”

Weapon developers also should focus on producing affordable systems, asserted Guadagnini. “If you spend a lot on seekers and sensors, you end up with fewer weapons … It’s a zero sum game.”

From the operator’s perspective, he said, “weapons have to be easy to use and inexpensive enough so we can practice with them … When a weapon is such a silver bullet that the squadron can’t practice with it, it’s no good.”

The Navy has sophisticated guided missiles, but they are too expensive, Guadagnini said. “A $700,000 [standoff land-attack] cruise missile against a truck doesn’t seem like an economical use of weaponry.” The same mission could be accomplished with a five-inch rocket for less than $1,000, “if you have the right sensor technology and the intelligence.”

Munitions also need to be durable. “The Marines bang them around when they are transporting them. Army helicopter guys bang them around,” Guadagnini said.

He described his ideal weapon as a “joint” munition that could be operated by all the services, and launched from any fixed-wing or rotary-wing aircraft in the current fleet. “It has to be some kind of small ordnance—a rocket or missile—that can go on all those platforms,” he said. “If we are not going that way, we are barking up the wrong tree.”

The U.S. Air Force, for its part, claims to have come up with a possible solution to the urban close-air support problem. The service is shipping to Iraq a new bomb, called Hardstop (hardened surface target ordnance package). It was designed to destroy the inside of buildings without damaging adjacent structures.

Hardstop is a GPS guided half-ton cluster bomb. A GPS receiver and a computer control the dispersal of 54 bomblets, which are programmed to penetrate the roof of a building and explode inside.

The Air Force also is developing a 250-pound JDAM-like weapon called the “small diameter bomb.” But even a warhead of that size can be too large if the intent is to avoid friendly casualties, said Matt Finley, a retired Army colonel and former deputy assistant to the Army’s vice chief of staff for force development.

“Depending on the construction of the buildings, even something as small as a 155 mm round may be too big,” he said.

“If collateral damage is a significant factor, you have to go with smaller bombs and more precise effects … If the goal is to hit a specific building without damaging the properties in the immediate surroundings, I don’t think there is a bomb out there that can do that, or an Army indirect fire weapon.”

The battles in Iraq show that current weapons, although more accurate than ever, are not precise enough to be useful in counterinsurgency operations, he added.

A weapon’s accuracy is measured in several ways. The “target location error” indicates how precisely it finds the target. Some of the most sophisticated munitions today advertise a TLE of about 10 meters. That means there is a 50 percent chance that the weapon will hit within 10 meters of the target.

Another measure is called “circular error probable.” A CEP of 10 meters means that, half the time, the weapon falls within a 10-meter circle around the target. Half the time it will fall outside.

“If I take TLE and CEP combined … you only have a 25 percent chance of landing in that area,” Finley said. “If the CEP is 10 meters or greater, you have a collateral damage problem. If I shoot at a building, and I’m 10 meters off, I’m going to hit an adjacent building.”

Finley, who served as a battalion executive officer in the 1991 Gulf War, recalled that the weapons used at the time had a CEP of 50 to 60 meters. The accuracy certainly has improved, he said, but not to the extent that is required for the urban settings that U.S. troops fight in today.

“As an artilleryman, a 10-meter CEP and a 10-meter TLE is fabulous, but in an urban environment, 10 meters puts you a city block off.”

These calculations force commanders to make tough decisions, he said. “It depends on the level of collateral damage you are willing to accept.”

No easy or inexpensive fix exists to this problem, Finley said. In the Army, particularly, the debate over how much money should be spent on smart munitions has gone on for years. “At the Pentagon, we wrestled with ammunition every week,” Finley said. “It’s just a tough thing to do. The technology is tough, which drives the cost.”

The steep price of sensors and seekers means the Army will buy fewer weapons. Commanders generally prefer to have more weapons, even if they are less precise. “It’s a series of trades that has to be made,” said Finley. “Precision costs.”

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