"...No target will be too cheap to engage."

[Prannon]

Recently, while perusing the Economist to get a taste of decent editorial news, I came across this article. The article describes recent US efforts to develop truly inexpensive guided munitions. It seems all well and good when fighting low-tech, cheap insurgencies, and can help to lower the cost of what has been prohibitively expensive anti-insurgency campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. Fine. What stuck out at me, though, was the final line in the article, which I have placed in the OP title and bolded below:

Cheap smart weapons

Rockets galore

Modern warfare is expensive. But it is about to become less so

Sep 29th 2012

MONEY, as Cicero observed more than two millennia ago, is the sinews of war. That is still true today. But lately, from the American point of view, things have got ridiculous. Guided missiles, in particular, are ludicrously expensive. A Tomahawk cruise missile costs about $1.5m, and even the Hellfire, an air-to-ground rocket that weighs a mere 50kg, is $115,000 a pop. In exchange for, say, an enemy tank, that is probably a fair price to pay. To knock out a pick-up truck crewed by a few lightly armed guerrillas, however, it seems a little expensive, and using its shoulder-fired cousin the Javelin ($147,000) to kill individual soldiers in foxholes, as is often the case in Afghanistan, is positively profligate. Clearly, something has to change. And changing it is.

An early sign of this change came in March, with the deployment in Afghanistan of the APKWS II (Advanced Precision Kill Weapons System) made by BAE Systems and Northrop Grumman. The APKWS II is a smart version of the old-fashioned 70mm (2.75-inch) rocket, which has been used by America’s armed forces since 1948. It is also cheap, as guided missiles go, costing $18,000 a shot.

The APKWS II is loaded and fired in the same way as its unguided predecessors, from the same 19-round pods, making its use straightforward. The difference is that it can strike with an accuracy of one metre because it has been fitted with a laser-seeking head which follows a beam pointed at the target by the missile’s operators. This controls a set of fins that can steer the missile to its destination.

Standard practice with unguided 70mm missiles is to use as many as two pods’ worth (ie, 38 rockets, at $1,000 a round) to blanket a target. That means the APKWS II comes in at less than half the cost per kill. It also means that many more targets can be attacked on a single mission.

Guide price

BAE and Northrop are merely the first to market with this sort of device. ATK, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon are all close behind. Meanwhile, the American navy has been working on its own cheap guided missile, the Low-Cost Imaging Terminal Seeker (LCITS), which it tested successfully last year.

The LCITS is another upgraded 70mm weapon, but instead of laser guidance it picks out its targets by their heat signature. Because the operators do not need to keep pointing a laser at the target, they can fire several missiles in quick succession—a useful feature if a ship is being attacked by a swarm of boats.

Smaller precision weapons are useful, too, in circumstances where weight is a crucial factor. Shadow, a drone used by the American, Australian and Swedish armies, is too light to be able to carry Hellfires and is thus, at the moment, restricted to reconnaissance duties. But not for much longer. Shadows are now being armed with a small, still-classified guided missile. This follows the earlier success of arming Hunter drones with Viper Strike, a laser-guided glide bomb weighing 20kg originally developed by Northrop Grumman as an anti-tank weapon and now owned by MBDA. Viper Strike, along with Raytheon’s Griffin, a similar weapon, also arms the marines’ Harvest Hawk, an aerial gunship based on the Hercules transport aircraft. Viper Strike means these aircraft are capable of hitting a large number of targets with great precision from a distance of several kilometres.

The most determined effort to develop a small, cheap guided weapon, though, is the Forward Firing Miniature Munition (F2M2, or Spike missile), from the Naval Air Weapons Station in China Lake, California. Steve Felix, the F2M2’s project manager, wanted to make such a weapon for just $5,000, using off-the-shelf components. The result, which weighs less than 3kg and is the size of a baguette, is claimed to be the world’s smallest.

Spike has been tested successfully as a shoulder-launched missile, and also fired from drones. It has an ingenious optical-guidance system—a camera that can either lock on to an operator-designated object or can pick up a laser spot and home in on it. It has a range of 1,500 metres and, though the warhead is too small to damage a tank, it can destroy cars and other light targets far more cheaply than the alternatives.

Precision weapons have already changed warfare radically, even though they have sometimes raised the price of battle. Low-cost guided missiles, often carried on small drones rather than expensive piloted aircraft, will change it further still. When such missiles cost a thousand dollars rather than a million, no target will be too cheap to engage.

Comments: I've read many opinions from board members in this forum about how drone warfare influences our battle doctrines, allowing for us to easily violate sovereignty (Pakistan) and easily strike targets. Perhaps too easily (civilian casualties from easy drone strikes gone wrong)? I ask the board, is this even something to be concerned about? Would such weapons be effective? Would this lower the cost of fighting insurgency type conflicts and save lives and money in the end, or would this make the US even more trigger happy since the cost of war just got much much less?

[Zaune]

Anyone else get the feeling we're blowing right past putting a price on human life and heading straight towards making it too cheap to meter?

[Sea Skimmer]

No target is too cheap in the first place, not when you have 100 billion dollar a year war budget supplementals. Sure it would be useful if less money was required, but its not likely to be a fundamental change for the US. The regular US budget for ammo is only 10-12 billion a year out of 500+ billion total regular budget defense spending. It means a lot more for smaller powers. also using masses of conventional weapons is doesn't actually work out to be that cheap for killing stuff anyway, its kind of mythical, but that never stopped the US either. Artillery batteries would fire hundreds of rounds each night in Vietnam literally at nothing through the wonders of attempting to apply a conventional warfare harassment doctrine against suspected VC occupied grid squares. After all we already paid for the guns and the men, why not pay for mountains of ammunition to keep them busy? Hell, I know of a video in which around 2 million dollars worth of GMLRS missiles were fired in Iraq... simply to level two small buildings so insurgents couldn't use them anymore. The buildings were used as IED factories and the Army didn't feel like risking men to demolish them with hand emplaced charges (cost, like 2000 dollars?) or wait around for an air strike that would be in the 100,000 range. Firing one of those missiles to kill a sniper isn't even a second thought, the problem is figuring out what the hell to even try to shoot at.

Small smart weapons really do is allow many more targets to be engaged much more quickly, that much in the article is correct, but that's just the endless advance of military firepower at work. Drone strikes in nations the US is not formally at war with certainly have nothing to do with new smaller cheaper weapons, Hellfire missiles and from time to time 500lb laser guided bombs remain the only weapons used by armed US Predator/Reaper drones to any serious extent in those operations. Plus the budgets for those operations are black and accountable to almost nobody in the first place. While smaller drones are expected to be armed on a wide scale in the near future, very few of these platforms have the range, flying endurance or communications systems required to conduct drone operations like the US has going on in Pakistan or Yemen. They, mainly the RQ-7 Shadow, are intended and suited only for close support of friendly ground forces. Even with the Obama surge of court of drone assassinations, the drones spend the vast majority of flying time just watching anyway, so having more weapons on board wouldn't seriously change anything. Its much more relevant in a major battle like 300 Taliban vs an outpost with 45 US troops inside it.

[Borgholio]

I don't think too much should be read into this article, aside from the obvious. The example cited about the helicopter rocket pods...using two pods worth of ammo for a single target, vs one small missile? Or that 5k missile the size of a loaf of french bread? I'd say that's a great idea. Leave the million-dollar cruise missiles for attacking large targets such as ships or command centers. A bunch of idiots driving around in a beat up Toyota? Don't waste the money. A parallel from World War 2 would be using a battleship's main guns to take out a machine gun nest near a landing zone. Sure it'd work, but if a 5" shell would do the same job, why not use that instead?

[PeZook]

I don't think too much should be read into this article, aside from the obvious. The example cited about the helicopter rocket pods...using two pods worth of ammo for a single target, vs one small missile? Or that 5k missile the size of a loaf of french bread? I'd say that's a great idea. Leave the million-dollar cruise missiles for attacking large targets such as ships or command centers. A bunch of idiots driving around in a beat up Toyota? Don't waste the money. A parallel from World War 2 would be using a battleship's main guns to take out a machine gun nest near a landing zone. Sure it'd work, but if a 5" shell would do the same job, why not use that instead?

As Skimmer pointed out, it's not really the cost, but the number of targets in time which actually matters. So you wouldn't fire battleship guns at machineguns (generally ; if that MG is inside a hardened bunker overlooking the beach...) because you'd want them loaded and ready to fire at harder stuff, not because the MG is too cheap to blow up. Certainly during landings where nothing else worth of a 16 inch shell existed, small pacific islands were sometimes literally raked with battleship fire aimed at nothing in particular, just to shake defenders up, kill some runners, collapse some tunnels...

[cosmicalstorm]

I recall a blurb about the most recent "Smart mines" being designed. That was truly terrifying to read. One could completely shut down a major harbor for weeks with nothing more than a dozen of them if I understood it correctly. Charles Stross had a big post on his blog detailing what he suspected would happen with regards to military/civilian surveillance once processors become so cheap that you could litter microscopic spy-sensors across entire cities on a budget of no more than a few million dollars. If I get to live the next few decades, it will be strange to see how warfare and society changes.

[Sea Skimmer]

Unsweepable naval mines have existed since WW2 in the form of pressure mines. This is one field in which high technology is actually aiding the defender as much or more then the attacker because the quality of mine classification sonars has immensely increased, while cost goes down. You have to hunt each mine down individually and then blow it up with divers or depth charges or, bless the US, a tiny homing mini torpedo is being fielded. In the past such sonars needed a dedicated minehunting warship to transport them, now several different small robotic drones exist which are able to carry one and carry out autonomous sweeps. They are also semi or fully submersible so they can operate close to enemy forces. This solves the traditional problem of minesweepers being sunk like flies on the job.

Though you also can just take the Russian option, they created a giant floating explosive rope similar to mine clearing line charges on land which is towed across the suspected field, by a helicopter, and then sunk to blowup the seafloor enmass. Now... figure in a modest case a 10 mile channel from the port mouth to find water too deep for pressure mines, and this is a shitload of explosives to expend.... but explosives are damn cheap compared to even a single minewarfare vessel and the helicopter need not be anything special.

Some really exotic mine concepts do exist, the US did a bit of study on an idea for a "sea predator' mine which was totally not a mine since it could move, and would have had a dozen microtorpedoes as its warhead, effectively making it the worlds worst attack submarine, but such concepts involve rather vast amounts of monies. Also some as yet iffy technology in the form of using sonar datalinks to control robot weapons. So basically, I wouldn't hold my breath on stuff like this.

[Borgholio]

The "torpedo" mine already exists. It's a full-size torpedo armed with acoustic sensors. It is released when a target that matches it's programming comes within range.

[Sea Skimmer]

Umm if you mean the Mk 60 CAPTOR it held a Mk46 lightweight torpedo not a full size one, and was not even remotely like what Sea Predator was supposed to be. Also out of service and apparently never actually worked that well, which is may be why nobody but the US ever fielded such a weapon while US production was limited. One basic problem anyway was it was basically thought up in 1960, took until 1979 to get it into production by which time submarines were far more capable. The Russians did and do field some interesting ASW rising mines though which are a sort of 50% of the way to CAPTOR kind of solution to deepwater mining.

[Borgholio]

Nothing I found on the CAPTOR indicates it was withdrawn from service. The most I found was that according to Jane, it had performance issues that were corrected in 1981.