| In recent wars, the emphasis on precision has been highlighted toward avoiding civilian casualties. The thing I hadn't fully appreciated is that in all-out conventional warfare, that same property makes weapons far more effective and efficient. The "reduced civilian casualties" angle gets emphasis in the popular press. On the military side, precision weapons were developed for greater combat effectiveness. See for example this 2010 article from Air Force Magazine, "The Emergence of Smart Bombs": https://www.airforcemag.com/article/0310bombs/ It recounts how hundreds of Vietnam War sorties with "dumb" bombs by the Americans failed to take down a sturdy Vietnamese bridge that was ultimately destroyed by one sortie with laser-guided bombs. That enormous increase in danger to designated targets was the main point of guidance. The reduction of danger to untargeted nearby terrain was just the happy corollary. Quoting the above article: “For point targets and in good weather conditions, these weapons had nearly a single-shot kill probability,” said Gen. William W. Momyer, former commander of 7th Air Force, in his book Airpower in Three Wars. “If the target could be seen and the target was vulnerable to the explosive power of the weapon, the probability of damage with a single weapon was 80 to 90 percent.” In the first three months of Linebacker, the Air Force destroyed more than 100 bridges with precision-guided munitions. An Air Force study found that laser-guided bombs were “100 to 200 times as effective as conventional bombs against very hard targets and 20 to 40 times more effective against soft and area targets.” In terms of combat effectiveness it was like turning a single bomber into a whole bomber squadron. |