Precision Bombing - Historical Experience Through Vietnam

Historical Experience Through Vietnam

The precision weapon, within generalized boundaries, will perform roughly equally well in all circumstances, provided a target can be identified. Time scales may change and levels of effort may change, but the end result—a victory for the force making the best use of precision—is unlikely to change unless other factors (such as loss of national will, changing international support, "wild cards," etc.) enter play. The single most important factor is how well the decision-maker, both military and political, appreciates what precision weapons can and cannot accomplish, what mechanism or process has been established to assess the appropriateness of their use, and the rules of engagement that govern their use.

Historical experience with precision guided munitions dates back over fifty years; there is a considerable body of historical experience that suggests how precision weapons have dramatically transformed military affairs. The precision weapon era dates to May 12, 1943, when a Royal Air Force Liberator patrol bomber dropped a Mk. 24 acoustic homing torpedo that subsequently seriously damaged the U-456, driving it to the surface where it was subsequently sunk by convoy escort vessels. On September 9, 1943, a German Fritz-X radio-guided glide bomb dropped from a Dornier Do 217 bomber sank the modern Italian battleship Roma as it steamed towards Gibraltar. Two months later, an anti-shipping missile launched from a Heinkel He 177 sank a British troopship with the loss of 1,190 American soldiers, one of the greatest of all maritime disasters. By war's end, Germany and the United States had employed various proto-smart weapons in combat, including radio, radar, and television-guided bombs and missiles, against targets ranging from industrial sites to bridges and enemy shipping.

Although not often thought of as a precision weapon, the various Kamikaze attackers that first appeared in the fall of 1944 functioned much like modern anti-shipping missiles, and thus can legitimately be considered a part of the precision weapon story. The Kamikaze was the deadliest aerial anti-shipping threat faced by Allied surface warfare forces in the war. Approximately 2,800 Kamikaze attackers sunk 34 Navy ships, damaged 368 others, killed 4,900 sailors, and wounded over 4,800. Despite radar detection and cuing, airborne interception and attrition, and massive anti-aircraft barrages, a distressing 14 percent of Kamikazes survived to score a hit on a ship; nearly 8.5 percent of all ships hit by Kamikazes sank. As soon as they appeared, then, Kamikazes revealed their power to force significant changes in Allied naval planning and operations, despite relatively small numbers. Clearly, like the anti-shipping cruise missile of a later era, the Kamikaze had the potential to influence events all out of proportion to its actual strength.

The need to destroy precision targets such as bridges had driven development of rudimentary guided bombs in the Second World War, and Korea accelerated this interest. In Korea, Air Force B-29's dropped the Razon and the much larger and more powerful Tarzon guided bombs on North Korean bridges, destroying at least 19 of them. The disappointing Korean bridge-bombing experience stimulated the Navy to pursue development of the postwar Bullpup program, the first mass-produced air to surface guided missile.

Accompanying this interest in Anti-Surface Warfare, was an equivalent drive to develop precision air-to-surface and surface to surface weapons for antishipping roles. In particular, the Soviet Union pursued development of such weapons as a means of countering the tremendous maritime supremacy of the Western alliance during the Cold War. One of the most significant events in the history of precision weaponry occurred on October 25, 1967, when the Israeli destroyer Eilat, patrolling 15 miles (24 km) off Port Said, was sunk by four Soviet-made Styx antishipping missiles fired from an Egyptian missile boat, killing or wounding 99 of its crew. The sinking of the Eilat had profound impact; one surface warfare officer remarked that "it was reveille" to the surface Navy." One senior American naval officer called the potential Styx threat his "worst nightmare."

The Soviet Union's alarming investment antiship missiles stimulated a tremendous investment in countermeasures. It influenced the purchase of the Grumman F-14 Tomcat, as well as more advanced airborne and surface early warning radars and fire control systems, and new gun and surface to air missile systems. But despite such corrective measures, the problems posed by newer generations of weapons continue to confront naval planners in the present day. Indeed, it can be argued that, at best, defensive measures have kept up with the threat, not surpassed it.

As the antishipping missile transformed war at sea, the advent of the laser-guided bomb revolutionized precision land attack, for it could function with an average circular error of less than twenty feet from the aim point. With this kind of accuracy, the need to operate mass flights of aircraft against a single aim point at last disappeared; it was as revolutionary a development in military air power terms as, say, the jet engine or aerial refueling. Even more significantly, an aircraft dropping a laser-guided bomb could drop it from outside the majority of an enemy's air defenses, thus further reducing the likelihood of incurring losses to enemy defenses. The modern precision weapon era may be said to have begun in May 1972, when laser-guided-bomb-armed McDonnell F-4 Phantoms perfunctorily took down the Paul Doumer and Thanh Hoa bridges in North Vietnam, as part of a larger campaign that shattered North Vietnam's invasion of South Vietnam in the spring of that year.