Why do the coalition forces use air launched ‘smart’ missiles e.g. The Americans with the ones from the B52s and the British with the Storm Shadow from the Tornados?
If these missiles can be launched from ships and submarines hundreds of miles away from Baghdad why risk the aircraft and pilots lives by making them fly into hostile airspace?
Maybe because the ships are out of range? Also ships carry a limited supply of missles.
I thought the aircraft are launching smart bombs. Missiles are more expensive and complex. A JDAM “smart bomb” is about $25,000 apiece. A Tomahawk cruise missile costs about $1 million each, IIRC.
The ship launched T-Lam had a range of 1000 miles. Baghdad is no more than 600 miles from the sea. So range couldn’t be a problem.
I doubt supply to the ships would be a problem.
So why use aircraft?
Sometimes those missiles are launched for the egress / escape of the aircraft itself. But I donno if that is the case here.
That’s a good question. I was going to second the idea of the JDAM (buy yours today!) until it was clarified… the JDAM being a cheapish retro-fit of guiding fins onto a regular bomb, the Tomahawk Land Attack Missile likes to be ship-launched. The things are 18-20 feet long, after all. The only reason I can imagine you’d haul one all that way is that it’s kinda slow. Is there a specific version they’re using for this? (Ie, the RN type is sub-launched, apparently).
BTW, I’ve worked with gov’t/mission critical stuff before, and everyone involved is reluctant to upgrade unless it’s necessary. But does anyone else think loading targets by tape is a bit old fashioned?
Tactical economics. Not every mission can be accomplished by the same missile launched from the same platform, and optimal use of resources for a particular mssion may indeed involve sending in aircraft, rather than lobbing TLAMs from the Red Sea over and over and over. There may be missions where you want time-to-target from the launching of an un-recallable weapon to be shorter, for instance. Also, depending on the aircraft you may also carry other systems to accomplish other missions along the way. Besides, there is also the “budgetary” consideration that there are only so many missiles in the ammo depots at any given time, why leave the Air Force’s just sitting there?
BTW, Nanoda, yes the B-52’s cruise missile AGM86-C (CALCM) is an entirely different creature than the Tomahawk, specifically designed for the air mission (as is the Storm Shadow CACOM – which on top of that is shorter-range than either of the American cruise missiles)
From what I’ve heard, the B-52 launched cruise missles carry a larger warhead than a TLAM, so if you need a bigger boom, you need an air launched missle. No cite, sorry.
Also Nonoda, I don’t think the tape loading process is used any longer. Originally, cruise missles were targeted exlcusively using terrain mapping data. New cruise missles also use GPS data, so targets can be reprogrammed much more rapdily. It’s this new capability that allowed the US to carry out the “decapitation strike” at the start of the war.