Excellent column by Arkin on the JDAM situation, and our strategy for Iraq. His comment on General Tommy Franks is telling, and confirms my suspicion. He is in a place to know.
washingtonpost.com
The Smart Bomb That Is Shaping U.S. Iraq Strategy
By William M. Arkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Wednesday, September 18, 2002; 9:22 AM
When Boeing announced last week that it has received a $378 million contract to accelerate production of satellite-guided bombs for the Air Force and Navy, it was a sure sign of the Bush administration's seriousness about preparing for a major war with Iraq. But the Boeing contract also suggests that the administration has neither a clear war-fighting strategy nor a firm timetable.
Boeing's satellite-guided bomb is called the Joint Direct Attack Munition, or JDAM. It was developed after the 1991 Gulf War, when unexpected rainy weather in Iraq wreaked havoc with U.S. laser-guided bombs. Rain and humidity disrupted the laser beams and made it more difficult for pilots to establish a "lock" on their targets.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that an all-weather guided weapon was the most important weapons innovation that came out of the Gulf War. The new JDAMs, guided by Global Positioning System satellites, were used for the first time in the NATO war in Yugoslavia in 1999. While the JDAM was slightly less accurate than laser-guided bombs under ideal conditions (capable of hitting within 30 feet of its target vs. 10 feet for the laser guided bombs), the new weapon proved reliable and deadly on the battlefield.
Weapons analysts also soon noticed that the failures of JDAMs were less severe than those of laser-guided bombs. When JDAMs missed, they usually fell within 150 feet of their "aim point." When the laser-guided bombs missed, they could land hundreds, if not thousands, of feet from their targets. The new JDAM could also be produced for less than $25,000 each--a tenth of the $250,000 price tag for the newest and most accurate laser-guided bomb.
The JDAM proved popular with U.S. commanders during the war in Yugoslavia-almost too popular. B-2 bombers dropped 700 JDAMs on Serbian targets, using up virtually the entire inventory of the new weapons. Had the war lasted longer, the lack of JDAMs would have soon limited the U.S.'s ability to launch strikes in all kinds of weather, particularly from the B-2 bomber. Seeking to prevent such shortages from occurring again, the Pentagon in 2000 boosted JDAM production to about 8,900 per year.
Now the Pentagon wants even more. Boeing's new contract will increase production to some 2,800 per month or 33,600 per year. Ultimately, this will increase the JDAM inventory to close to a quarter million, according to the trade newsletter Defense Daily.
But right now, the inventory is less than 20,000 worldwide, a fact that is central to U.S. preparations for war in Iraq. Air Force sources insist that the inventory of JDAMs, as well as laser-guided bombs, and their deployment in the right locations, is one of the major factors limiting the U.S. ability to fight a war in Iraq right now. To some, the inventory simply needs to be built up like a volunteer fire department fundraising campaign: when the goal is reached, victory is complete. Others, though, see a danger in designing a war on the basis of the inventory, rather than following a strategy that is not constrained by how many weapons, or what types, are available.
The example of the Afghan war suggests caution is in order. Some 6,000 JDAMs have been used in Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan since last October 7. No one anticipated that so many of these guided weapons (together with another 6,000 plus laser-guided bombs) would be used. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said there were few good targets in Afghanistan and the Taliban's arms were primitive. U.S. aircraft mounted only about 100 strike missions daily in Afghanistan, one-sixth the number in Yugoslavia and one-fifteenth the number in Operation Desert Strom in 1991.
But Gen. Tommy Franks, the operation commander and initially a JDAM skeptic, found the weapon to be incredibly reliable and easy to employ. With a relatively low level of effort, U.S. forces wound up using an enormous number of guided weapons. That is because heavy bombers can drop large numbers in each strike mission. In Afghanistan, the B-1 and B-52 were the main users of JDAM; the stealthy B-2 only flew six missions, and those were in the first three days.
With the inventory dwindling, U.S. commanders started to look over the horizon at Iraq and ask themselves a crucial question: How many JDAMs would the military need in order to defeat Iraq? They know that U.S. planes would launch many more strikes than the 100 daily that were used in Afghanistan. A Desert Storm-like effort, with over a thousand-strike missions daily, could potentially consume the inventory in less than a month.
These are the questions that Pentagon war planners have been addressing for months. For instance, B-2 bomber advocates have been floating a proposal to use their stealth assets, some flying from Missouri, some from Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, to deliver a single "mass precision" strike on Iraq in the opening hours of a war. "The theory is it might shock them into collapse," one B-2 industry expert says. Such an air mission would deliver 256 one-ton JDAMs on 256 separate targets almost simultaneously. They could be joined by hundreds of additional Tomahawk sea-launched cruise missiles and cruise missiles launched from B-52s-all of them virtually impervious to being shot down by Iraqi air defenses. After an initial blow with hundreds of precision weapons, there would be methodical follow-up strikes by more vulnerable B-1 and B-52 bombers and Air Force and Navy fighters, all in the same 24-hour period. Oh, and by the way, all of those planes are now capable of carrying JDAMs as well. Far more than a thousand JDAMs could be delivered in a single day. And, in theory, that number could be delivered day after day.
Were war to start tomorrow, many are already arguing that the JDAM inventory is a limitation on the United States. That is because though Iraq is a military paper tiger in my opinion, it also represents tens of thousands of potential targets and "aimpoints": air defense and communications sites, factories possibly used for weapons of mass destruction, depots, airbases, military barracks, bridges, etc. If war planners include individual tanks and armored vehicles, which were quite rare in Afghanistan but will be available by the thousands to Iraqi forces, the number of potential targets indeed is quite daunting. Some bonehead planner could argue that the formula for victory in Iraq is delivering one guided bomb -- JDAM or laser-guided weapon -- onto each individual target vehicle, the traditional, time-consuming strategy of attrition.
In this scenario, the JDAMs would pave the way for U.S. ground forces to trundle into the streets of liberated Iraqi villages and cities. Arguably, it would be necessary to stockpile a huge number of JDAMs in order to make this approach work. Add to that the military's tendency to plan for the "worst case" and you might see why some shake their heads asking why it took the Pentagon until now to just put Boeing on a "wartime" production footing. But such complaints assume that there is some direct relationship between the number of aimpoints, the availability of the new hallowed JDAMs, and victory. Airpower analysts have been making the argument for years that precision targetting make the new weapons vastly more efficient than old "dumb" weapons. The Gulf War Air Power Survey conducted after Operations Desert Storm concluded that it took about 13 "dumb" bombs to destroy as much as one precision weapon. If the precision weapon had been launched from a stealth fighter, each one destroyed as much as 26 dumb bombs. In Afghanistan Northern Alliance commanders were in awe of the ability of JDAMs to hit Taliban targets. One spotter near Bagram is said to have killed 3,000 Taliban soldiers in a single day by calling in strikes. The airpower advocates now argue that overwhelming all-weather high-altitude precision bombing in Iraq could render a war of attrition unnecessary.
Gen. Franks, who will direct any attack on Iraq, is not known for having a nimble mind, and the dominant view in the Pentagon, particularly the Army, is that more U.S. ground forces in the mix ensure the desired outcome on the ground. The feeling is that the Al Qaeda and Taliban leaderships slipped away in Afghanistan because the back door wasn't closed by U.S. boys. Rumsfeld seems not to completely buy this argument. He keeps sending Iraq war plans produced by Franks and his staff back to the drawing boards for not being "imaginative" enough.
Meanwhile, the Air Force and Navy are building up their JDAM and smart weapons inventories in theater both because it is the best weapon currently available in abundance and because they have no idea what strategy Rumsfeld and President Bush will ultimately select. Boeing won't be able to start producing 2,800 JDAMs a month until August 2003. The perception that there may be a limit on the availability of these preferred smart weapons is already influencing planning for a possible attack on Iraq by favoring a traditional approach.
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