So what percentage of buildings would we hit? gitfiddle’s first link says that the percentage would be low. The British, using smart bombs, hit only 40% of their targets in Kosovo. In the airstrikes in Iraq way back in early 2001
That’s not “we only hit 8 out of 25”, that’s “we only damaged 8 out of 25”. The Pentagon said something along the lines of “software glitches, all will be fine soon”. So it seems the question is: do these bombs really work? Versus radar points they scored 32% (and that’s damage, not direct hits). This is not in the same ballpark as the 90% figures being bandied about in this thread. Also, I don’t think there’s any confusion here about the definition of target. The target is the place they aimed at. At least, that’s how I read “aim point”.
So, does anyone have up to date figures for the hit percentage of “smart bombs”, say, after the software problems were sorted out?
Regarding the morality of running GPS jammers over cities, at some point the onus is on the attacker. I would argue that if someone sets up jamming that makes the bombs fly at random and you know that they have this jamming, you do not fire your bombs into that area. Why? Your enemy has sucessfully countered your technology. Since you would not simply lob bombs into a city without any kind of guidance, and your bombs are now unguided, you can’t use them. Bad guys 1, heroes 0. If you Shoot your missiles anyway, then I would change the score to Bad guys 1, Not-heroes-anymore -1.
Jurph, with respect to those videos of the bomb dropping in and blowing up the building, hitting specified targets the size of a postcard or whatever it is that they do, I have to ask: so what? You don’t know how many times they ran that test. The existence of the video proves only that they hit the sweet spot one time. The question is: how often do they hit that spot? The only citations that I have seen in this thread concerning the accuracy of these weapons says “40%, tops”. When the US was going after radar installations they missed by an average of 100 yards. Does this imply that the CEP for these weapons in actual combat conditions is 100 yards? How does that compare to regular “dumb” bombs?
Depends on whether you’re discussing the Iraq War and the OP’s first question, or whether you’re discussing the raid on the Iraqi air defenses, two years earlier. We still don’t have a real assertion for the OP’s original question, so I’ll leave that alone. The 2001 attack on the air defenses has got to be some kind of anomaly, however.
It’s got to be back up near 90% – if the CEP is back to single-digit meters, they’re hitting their target every time.
Yeah, but the real solution is easier: you blow up his jamming equipment (it’s radiating on a known frequency, so it’s easy to find!) so you can continue going after military targets.
You ought to watch the entire video again. If you keep an eye on the timestamp at the end, they show five more weapons going through the same target later that same afternoon. Of the six total weapons shown, three of them go through the same hole punched through the blockhouse by the first weapon. So four of the six hit the same spot, and two more hit within a few meters.
I do take your point that none of the misses would be shown; it’s not good data, but it’s an interesting data point. Four missiles through the same hole lends a little more credibility to the idea that the 2001 raid was a fluke.
The JDAM (the GPS-guided 500-pounder) is usually attributed a CEP of 13m, tweaked down to 3m for high precision, both of which are compared against the bomb’s normal CEP of 30m. Since the average miss distance in the 2001 raid was 100 yards, I’ve got to suspect that there was a bias in some of the software packages for that airstrike. Obviously there’s no way to know without satellite photos of all of the intended targets, but I suspect the 100 yard miss distances were all 100 yards off in the same direction. One thing that could explain it would be if that weapon had only ever been tested in the western hemisphere; a sign error in the longitude calculations for eastern longitudes might go unnoticed. But that’s just speculation based on the really atrocious miss distances here.
I know anecdotes can’t take the place of data, but take the 2006 strike on al-Zarqawi as another example; two bombs were dropped, and both hit the house. If the bombs tend to miss by hundreds of meters, and have a 40% chance of hitting their target, then you’d be much more likely to see one bomb hit the target and one land a few tens of meters away from the house. With a “40% tops” accuracy, you only have about a 1-in-7 chance of getting both bombs to hit the same target.
Furthermore, if the 2001 raid were indicative of how we usually performed, we would have dropped six or ten bombs on Zarqawi. But we didn’t – we only dropped two. Assuming that the targeteers and mission planners know the accuracy of the weapons, why would they only specify dropping two bombs?
First of all, concerning the 3m CEP on these bombs, I did some quick Google searches and was only able to come up with projections for the 3m figure. Well, except for some random fanwankery, but that doesn’t really count. Have they really achieved this or is it just a goal? I’m not saying that they have, just that all the articles I found said things like “the standard CEP is 13 meters, but there is a high precision package which should lower that to 3 meters.” With respect to the 13 meter figure they talked about a specific test that was run in which the bombs actually average 10.3 meters from target. Concerning the 3 meter figure, nothing I found cited actual tests with numbers, just that this was either already here or coming soon. I’m talking about the JDAM type bombs. There does seem to be a difference in the accuracy of bombs and missiles, which I would assume is because the missiles are powered?
I tried to watch the video again, but YouTube won’t load videos for me right now. I’ll try again later. In the meantime, can you point me to information about the difference between these bombs and the ones used during the first Gulf war? Back in the day, CNN used to replay the video of the bomb dropping in through the window. Same video, every 7 seconds. (Ok, it only seemed like 7 seconds…) Was that video an accurate representation of the technology of smart bombs at the time?
As far as the Zarqawi raid, it is just one house in the middle of nowhere. Maybe it’s easier to hit something if it’s the only something in town? I don’t know. But if you have any figures on actual accuracy in urban conditions I would be interested to see them. I realize that this can be tricky, because the military doesn’t like to release such figures, but they do trickle out.
Finally, I saw Why We Fight about 6 weeks ago, and I think I remember the scene that the OP is talking about. The film crew are interviewing Iraqi citizens about the first night of airstrikes on Baghdad. The people are all very upset because their homes were blown up. If you have a window 20 feet across that you can drop your bomb into, then you hit the building you were intending to hit. There were lots of people whose houses were blown up because they lived next to a palace. The targets in this case were not people, but rather the buildings those people were supposed to be in; nobody cares if you blow up Saddam’s palace and he happens not to be inside.
The movie then flashes up a card that says that the first night, none of the bombs hit the right places.
At least, that’s how I remember it from the movie, but it’s a little hazy. I’ve seen a couple of these anti-war docs and they tend to run together.
sinjin (sorry if that wasn’t coherent. It’s shaping up to be a sketchy day…)
During the first Gulf War they played those precision bombing movies over and over, but the little publicized truth was that most of the bombs dropped were not precision munitions but old-fashioned iron bombs. It wasn’t exactly a secret, but the Pentagon deliberately played up the use of smart bombs even though they were only a small part of our arsenal.
But by the time Kosovo rolled around they didn’t even bother dropping iron bombs anymore…too politically risky.
Now, how accurate are “precision” munitions? They surely aren’t 100% accurate, but they aren’t 0% accurate either.
I may be mistaken, but isn’t the CEP calculated something like “the CEP is the radius around the target in which (50% or 95%, I don’t know the number - does anyone?) of the bombs/missiles will land.”
But how accurate were they back then, even the precision bombs? The JDAM type bombs that were mentioned above weren’t operational until 1997, and their CEP was 13 meters. As I understand it, that means that half the time the bomb lands within 40 feet of where you want it to. Cite for JDAM accuracy.Wikipedia definition of Circular Error Probable.
And wevets, the CEP apparently means that 50% of your bombs will hit within the given radius. I got this definition from Wikipedia, but I’m willing to look at other sources.
This article was written by an Air Force major who previously flew F-16s; the publication date is March 06. In the second paragraph he states:
I’ve removed his footnotes for clarity but you can see his sources in the full article. I think that’s as close to a real cite as you’re going to get. Boeing’s public JDAM pages don’t cite CEP numbers, possibly because the true data on CEP is classified.
Not sure about that; the main advantages of a missile over a bomb are stand-off range and penetrating power.
I suspect (but don’t know for sure) that the picture we all watched on CNN was a laser-guided bomb, or even a television-guided bomb. That is, the pilot sees what the bomb sees, and steers it into the target manually. At Squadron Officers’ School (summer 2005), we read that less than 1% of Vietnam War bombs were precision-guided (laser-aimed); 7% of the Gulf War bombs were precision-guided (laser and TV); 70% in Kosovo (laser and JDAM); 90% in Iraq 2003 (laser and JDAM).
Whether it’s urban or rural shouldn’t matter unless the buildings are very tall and/or very closely spaced. It would be almost impossible, for example, to go through a first-story window that faced a 10-foot-wide alley between two 30-story buildings, because of the slant angle. I don’t really know enough about the mechanics of weapon delivery to say for sure, but yeah - with Zarqawi you can come from any direction you like, and drop on any slant angle you please; with a Baghdad palace, you probably want to make the weapon approach from a more vertical direction. You might have to use a Tomahawk (which can fly in flat and then nose-over) for something this precise – I don’t know. In any case, I can’t cite known-classified figures even if they “trickle out”.
Probably because we were using 1,000 or 2,000 pound bombs rather than the standard 500 pounders. A 2,000 pound laser guided bomb has a blast radius of over 100m, and would probably cause significant collateral damage to adjacent targets. The goal with a 1- or 2,000 pounder is to bust through the building and smash any bomb shelter that might be in the basement (and ideally sink the blast into a deep hard-walled hole, so debris goes nearly straight up, minimizing collateral damage) – all of which which argues for a near-vertical delivery as well.
Unless you’re stating that their houses got blown up instead of the palace, which I find less likely. Saddam’s palaces were/are ostentatious and very distinct from the surrounding neighborhood.
Sure we do! Buildings that don’t contain any valid military targets won’t make the strike list. I’m not a targeter by trade, but I worked in a targeting and bomb-damage assessment cell for the first few months of the (2003) Iraq War. I’m not allowed to go into details about what I did (sorry, I know that’s lame) – but we don’t have bombs to waste on known-empty buildings.
None of the bombs hit the right places? I don’t think so. This report details the first night of attacks (“shock and awe”). A reporter for National Geographic says
If you or the OP can provide a cite that says we missed all of the intended targets on the first night, I’d love to see it, because I honestly doubt that we were as “surgical” as the publicity stated reports… but I also don’t think we missed every target we aimed for.
That’s the definition I’ve been using, and it’s the standard throughout (at least) the U.S. military. CEP for laser-guided bombs (GBU-12) is 3.6 feet (Wikipedia) – the “99 bombs” statistic probably means they assume that one bomb in a hundred goes wildly off-target because the guidance system isn’t “guiding”, and they don’t count it in the average. That’s a good measure of our top-of-the-line weapons for the Gulf War.
Ok, this will be my last post in this thread for a while, I’ve got to, you know, work and stuff. I hope it continues and I can pick it up this weekend, because it’s been very interesting.
Concerning my statement: “nobody cares if you blow up the palace and there wasn’t anybody inside.” I meant that to be taken from the perspective of assessing accuracy of bombs. If nobody is living there at that moment, it’s a failure of intelligence and not bombing accuracy. You should count that target as having been hit. I meant this to be an acknowledgment of your earlier distinction between types of targets. For the purposes of talking about dropping bombs, I think the only reasonable standard you can evaluate the effectiveness of the weapons is whether they hit what you were pointing at, not whether they bad guy was in that building. The hope is that you don’t accidentally point your bombs at civilians.
I don’t believe that all of the bombs/missiles launched the first night missed their targets, I was trying to reconstruct the scene in the movie. I don’t remember the card that flashed up, but I don’t think that “target” can mean either people or establishments. I thought that many of the targets (as in edifices) were tactical in nature.
Also, I think I may have found a reference to one of the scenes highlighted in the movie. There was a bomb aimed at a security station which actually hit the hospital. From here.
There are other examples of bombs gone astray, sometimes far enough that noone could identify the intended target.
The essay is admittedly a little breathless, but it is contemporary and essentially lists known instances of bombs missing their targets or targeting civilians. One statistic that I found interesting is in a small table, about 3/4 of the way down the page linked above:
Now, these numbers have dubious meaning, as the 88,000 tons of weapons dropped in the first Gulf war includes a lot of bombs dropped in the desert, et cetera, but it does make me wonder how much the people planning the drops were listening to the advice of Maj. Sine. Specifically regarding his admonition that you cannot bomb an artillery piece if it’s in the middle of a marketplace, because you will certainly kill a whole bunch of civilians in the marketplace.
This is the situation as I see it: the US military wants to bomb targets in urban environments. It is unacceptable to various groups inside and outside of the US military to drop unguided bombs in urban environments because the likelihood of missing the designated target is too great. There exist various bombs with guidance systems that should let you designate a building and blow up exactly that building, and not the one next to it, and these weapons are being used. If the bombs do not actually perform up to the standards advertised, then the people dropping the bombs need to develop a different method.
Now, the question is: how accurate are these weapons in actual practice? Testing says that the bombs hit their targets. When actually dropping these bombs in cities, how accurate are the bombs in terms of hitting the intended target and how good are the bombers at designating the target they are really aiming at? Table 1 in the essay I cited compiles incidents of civilian casualties (mostly from bombing, but also from other sources) during the first weeks of the current war in Iraq. Unfortunately I think that statistics like this will be practically impossible to acquire, at least in the near future.
Oh, one last thing, I realize you cannot comment on known-classified data, but some information does get out to the press. For instance the 40% figure given by the British for their operations in Kosovo or the 32% of radar stations damaged in prior air strikes. As for your guess that the dismal accuracy of bombs against radar sites may have been due to a software error not caught because the weapons were tested in the wrong hemisphere, was that a joke or do you really consider that to be a serious possibility?
Gr… thought of something else. You seem to have worked in this area. I wonder if you could comment on the last two paragraphs of the Wiki page on CEP:
Thanks, and I look forward to continuing this discussion in the future.
Ditto, but I’ll be out of town this weekend. If you post over the weekend I should have a reply Monday or Tuesday-ish.
That’s pretty much dead-on. My only caution is not to conflate “accuracy” or “effectiveness” figures that don’t come with definitions into your CEP calculations.
Yeah, I read that one, too. It focuses on the human cost in a really subjective way, and seems to count deaths differently based on the victim’s age, gender, poverty, or mechanism of death. I didn’t really like his tone – for an academic paper it came off as very left-leaning and biased, and felt like he was out of his area of expertise (economics and women’s studies ). I could set aside a whole Pit thread discrediting his article and pointing out his rhetorical tricks, but you seem savvy enough that I’ll assume you’re looking only at his data and not his rhetoric. His assertion that “smart weapons have become deliberately stupid” (emphasis mine) tests my patience – he seems to think that somewhere there is a U.S. military that, from top to bottom, uses infallible intelligence to find the poorest, most doe-eyed innocents possible and deliberately drop explosive ordnance on them in a manner calculated to maim, and that we do this for kicks. :mad: …I’ll vent later.
The secret police HQ across from the hospital is probably a case of bad weaponeering – choosing the wrong bomb for the job. I don’t know what bomb they used, but I don’t think a 500-pounder could do that amount of collateral damage. Perhaps the secret police had some sort of hardened shelter inside that required such a large bomb? Again, I don’t know the whole story. It’s pretty obvious that the secret police HQ was placed near the hospital specifically to increase the chance that we’d hit civilians (and fools that we are, we took the bait). In any case, we hit the target dead-on (note that in the picture the sobbing woman is standing on the remains of the flattened police station), so this is not so much a case against accuracy as a case for careful weapon selection.
I think you’re right on this count, and the Air Force is already looking to develop weapons with smaller blast radii like the small diameter bomb. Note that this weapon is being developed with a planned CEP of 3 meters as well. With only 50 pounds of explosive, the blast radius is going to be very small. Also, Maj Sine’s article is from 2006 – it’s entirely possible that it’s based on lessons he learned from the Iraq War.
The problem is that most of the time they do work as advertised, so planners take their performance for granted and don’t leave room for other sources of error. The anomalies are tragic, and it’s impossible to tell an orphaned Iraqi not to take statistical anomalies personally, but that’s basically what happens. You drop several hundred (or thousand) weapons on cities, and a few are going to miss, and assuming people are distributed evenly, some of those people are going to die because your weapon was imperfect. Also (and I hate to keep harping on this) we’ve put “precision” guidance packages on 2,000-pound bombs. These are militarily useful for cracking open bomb shelters in cities, but it’s pretty much impossible to leave anything nearby standing when you use one. Somewhere a mission planner has probably said “I sure hope nobody’s in those houses when we run this strike.”
The number of civilian casualties is not really a good measure of weapon accuracy or precision, but it may be the only measure We the People get. I know military units are fiendish about collecting operational statistics (promotions are based, in part, on being able to take credit for improvements in your unit’s numbers). If someone told me that the commanders were not tracking their pilots’ “batting averages” I would be flabbergasted. I know you’re looking for a number, and I wish I had one for you. If you really wanted, you could send a FOIA request to a fighter squadron that you know was over there for the first week of operations. You might even be able to send a FOIA request to the JDAM acquisition office – the guys whose job it is to figure out the operational effectiveness of the bombs the DoD buys.
Just a guess, from catching similar errors in code that I’ve written – hemisphere sign errors can be hell to troubleshoot. Wikipedia’s GPS article lists some of the possible error sources in the signal, and none of them accounts for that large miss distance. Perhaps the bombs were designed to filter out the error induced by Selective Availability mode – but with SA deactivated in 2000, the error was not there? I really don’t know, but that many large-diameter misses makes me suspect a systemic problem rather than a series of individual failures.
They pretty much nailed it. The distribution of PGMs is not a normal distribution; therefore more weapons will hit right near the CEP radius than you would expect, and fewer will miss by more than 2 CEP. As long as the guidance system works and is aimed at the right target, that’s basically a guaranteed hit. Someone has to ensure a clear path to the target, so that the bomb doesn’t go through a neighboring building on its way down, but I don’t know whose job that is.
Former F-16 driver & dropper of many bombs, smart & otherwise …
An issue folks forget about GPS bombs is that now you have a dependency on the accuracy of your maps. Once the pilot types the corrdinates into the bomb, it will land at N35.27.48.0010 W120.45.6789 +/- 10-ish feet barring malfunctions.
But where on Earth is that spot? Remember you start from a map or satellite photo, find what you want to hit and then read the coords off the map/photo.
The technology of tactical map making & photo geo-locating has improved markedly from the 1980s, but it would not surprise me a bit to find that even today in some areas of even countries of interest like Iraq, the maps are off by a couple hundred feet.
The result is the bomb lands at the correct lat/long where the little box is printed on the map, but the real building on the real Earth is 100 meters North of that point. Oops.
Lasers don’t have that issue, but they do have the issue that they can be interrupted, or blocked by smoke / haze, or aimed at the wrong building in a town because of operator error or map error.
If the bomb loses sight of the laser on the way in, it’ll land wherever its ballistic path intersects the surface. IOW, it instantly becomes a dumb bomb. If the laser operator picks the wrong building, well the bomb will hit where the laser is pointed.
There are also hybrid systems that use a laser in the aircraft to measure the location of a spot the pilot sees on the ground versus the aircrafts’ location, do the trig to figure out teh lat/long/altitude of that spot, and then use GPS guidance in the bomb to drive it to land at teh derived coordinates. these systems eliminate teh dependency on accurate maps/photos, but introduce other errors in the mechanical accuracy of the laser turret system, plus dispersion, slant range vs inherent precision, etc.
In all, weapons are not magic. The latest ones are a damn sight better than sending 200 B-17s to scatter bombs all over a few square miles generally surrounding where you think the target is. But anybody who starts thinking of aerial bombardment as akin to sniping is way off base.
). I could set aside a whole Pit thread discrediting his article and pointing out his rhetorical tricks, but you seem savvy enough that I’ll assume you’re looking only at his data and not his rhetoric. His assertion that “smart weapons have become deliberately stupid” (emphasis mine) tests my patience – he seems to think that somewhere there is a U.S. military that, from top to bottom, uses infallible intelligence to find the poorest, most doe-eyed innocents possible and deliberately drop explosive ordnance on them in a manner calculated to maim, and that we do this for kicks. :mad: …I’ll vent later.