America loves smart bombs. Ever since World War II, precision warfare has appealed to what America sees as its strengths: High technology, efficiency and the ability to strike down its enemies with a minimum of harm to innocents.
But that’s actually a myth argues Amos Fox, a retired US Army lieutenant colonel. Precision-guided munitions, or PGMs, are no more effective than conventional munitions in limiting collateral damage, and in some cases can make the damage worse.
Fox calls this the “precision paradox.” Or, “the incongruence between precision strike theory and the fervent enthusiasm of precision ideologues,” he wrote in an essay for the Royal United Services Institute, a British think tank.
Precision warfare is associated today with guided missiles, but the concept dates back to the 1930s, when the US began to embrace high-altitude daylight bombing by heavy bombers such as the B-17 Flying Fortress. Swayed by Italian airpower theorist Giulio Douhet, American planners were convinced they could cripple an adversary by bombing its factories, without the need for a costly ground war.
This contrasted with Britain’s night area-bombing strategy in World War II that targeted entire German cities. Even if factories weren’t hit, residential neighborhoods would be destroyed and workers “de-housed,” which was expected to collapse the public’s morale. In practice, the distinction between precision and area bombardment proved blurry: bombing through cloudy European skies that obscured targets, while under fighter and flak attack and relying on pencil-on-paper navigation plotting and rudimentary bomb sights meant the majority of American bombs failed to hit their target.
PGMs were supposed to solve this problem. Why drop a dozen bombs when a single GPS-guided missile can destroy a bridge or a command post? Fox sees several flaws in modern precision strike theory. For one, “decapitation” strikes intended to defeat an enemy by eliminating its leaders and command posts have not worked. Nor does Fox believe that the precision strike strategy has actually shortened wars.
But most significantly, Fox questions the essence of US precision warfare: the belief that smart bombs spare a need for boots on the ground. “Accurate strikes are not equivalent to effective strikes,” he wrote. In other words, a strike can land on the intended area, selected based on intelligence, and yet fail to achieve the goal of, say, killing a militant leader or stopping a factory from making more bombs, hence necessitating follow-on strikes. When PGMs don’t accomplish the mission, “then precision-based warfighting requires additional strikes and, likely, a subsequent use of land force activities to offset the shortcomings of precision strikes.”
This can actually result in higher civilian casualties than if conventional weapons had been used in the first place because it requires repeated attacks. “If precision strikes are often accurate, but ineffective, and additional strikes or land operations are required to create the effect intended with the initial precision strikes, then precision strategies do not decrease civilian casualties and collateral damage in conflict zones.”
Fox points to the extensive use of American PGMs during the ferocious battles of Raqqa and Mosul in 2016-2017. In trying to root out heavily fortified Islamic State positions dug into civilian neighborhoods, many buildings were destroyed and thousands killed. Israel faces a similar situation today as it hunts Hamas in Gaza.
Thus the paradox: an individual PGM may be more accurate than a dumb bomb. But if a PGM fails to knock out a target — whether due to poor intelligence or the pure chance that reigns on battlefields — more guided weapons have to be launched, thus defeating the whole purpose of precision.
“Accurate strikes do not inherently mean effective,” Fox told Business Insider. “Therefore, more strikes are required when a strike does not effectively accomplish its intended purpose. Thus, in the aggregate, if a PGM isn’t 100 percent effective, it can often result in similar outcomes to ballistic artillery, or other non-precision munition employment.”
Fox doesn’t believe that smarter bombs will solve the paradox. “Better PGMs isn’t really the problem,” he said. “PGMs are currently about as accurate as can be. For that matter, although artillery is an area fire weapon, it is still very accurate.”
But what about the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, in which massive amounts of PGMs are being employed? In Ukraine, both sides are using massive numbers of guided weapons, at a rate that is depleting stockpiles and factory capacity, yet neither side has managed to achieve decisive results. Israel carried out strikes in Gaza against 29,000 targets in the first four months of the war, often with guided weapons, but that has failed so far to destroy Hamas.
“The lesson is that Hamas is a land force,” said Fox. “The inconvenient truth about war is that it still requires a land force to defeat a land force. Precision warfare, which isn’t really a thing, augments a land force in defeating another land force. It doesn’t replace it.”
Michael Peck is a defense writer whose work has appeared in Forbes, Defense News, Foreign Policy magazine, and other publications. He holds an MA in political science from Rutgers Univ. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.
