The proliferation of long-range precision strike weapons to nations other than the United States remains nascent and contrary to conventional wisdom because even as China and Iran try to develop anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) capabilities, the militaries of other nations have not had the U.S.’s compelling need for this technology, according to a Washington think tank.
Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) Senior Fellow Barry Watts, in his report “The Evolution of Precision Strike,” said international relations theory has long argued that competition among nations creates a powerful incentive for states to emulate the military practices of the more successful states, much like how use of the atomic bomb spread since World War II. Since the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Watts said conventional precision strike weapons have become even more centric to the American way of war.
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| Artist’s rendering of Lockheed Martin’s JASSM-ER. Photo: Lockheed Martin. |
Proliferation of precision conventional-strike weapons, which Watts said was expected to spread rapidly following successful use in Vietnam, has been slow for three reasons. Other nations have not had a compelling need for precision strike, Watts said, because the Russians, since the Cold War ended, neither had the resources to invest heavily in such technology nor, in the case of military operations in Chechnya, Estonia and Georgia, a compelling need to do so. Watts also said countries like France and the United Kingdom, while possessing the technical capacity to develop these weapons, have also not made the necessary investments to do so.
Watts said the sheer complexities and inherent difficulties of fielding and integrating various requirements needed to prosecute mobile targets in near-real-time has made diffusion of precision strike slow. Various guided munitions; wide-area sensors; positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) capabilities and networked command, control, communications and computers (C4), Watts said, are needed to hit relocatable, mobile or fleeting targets in near-real-time. Watts said for fixed targets such as bases or ports, accurate cruise or ballistic missiles with sufficient range usually suffice. But in the case of emergent, moving or other time-sensitive targets, Watts said battle networks able to find targets and strike promptly are essential while effective battle networks have proven extraordinarily difficult to establish and sustain under actual combat conditions.
High unit costs are another reason why extended range precision strike remains predominantly an area of a virtual U.S. monopoly, Watts said. While modern precision guided munitions (PGM) have rendered accuracy independent of the distance to the target from firing positions or weapon release, they have not rendered unit costs independent of the range to the target. Watts said long-range cruise missiles such as the extended-range variant of the Air Force’s Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile (JASSM-ER), developed by Lockheed Martin [LMT], and the Navy’s Tactical Tomahawk, developed by Raytheon [RTN], are “considerably” more expensive than the Raytheon’s unpowered Small Diameters Bomb (SDB) and, especially, the Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) developed by Boeing [BA].
Watts listed both the JASSM-ER and Tactical Tomahawk clocking in at over $1.4 million each while the SDB cost $245,441 apiece and the JDAM just $26,641 per weapon.
Precision strike weapons will eventually proliferate into the hands of prospective U.S. adversaries, Watts said, raising the possibility that countries like China and Iran will one day manage to exploit the weapons by creating “no-go” zones in which it would be too difficult and costly for the United States to project military power using today’s oversea bases and expeditionary forces. How soon this will occur is anyone’s guess, Watts said, considering how slow the technology has proliferated since Desert Storm in the early ’90s.