Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Precision Munitions

Episode Date: June 15, 2022

In 1940, an investigation conducted by the British military found that only 1 in 5 of their bombers were actually landing bombs within five miles of their intended targets.  This level of inaccuracy wasn’t just dangerous in terms of collateral damage, but it was horrible in terms of achieving military objectives.  This inaccuracy has led to the development of ever more precise munitions, which is still going on today. Learn more about precision munitions and how it is possible to drop a bomb in a pickle barrel, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Subscribe to the podcast!  https://podfollow.com/everythingeverywhere/ -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Darcy Adams Associate Producers: Peter Bennett & Thor Thomsen   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/everything-everywhere-daily-podcast/ Everything Everywhere is an Airwave Media podcast." or "Everything Everywhere is part of the Airwave Media podcast network Please contact [e-mail] to advertise on Everything Everywhere. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1940, an investigation conducted by the British military found that only one in five of their bombers were actually landing bombs within five miles of their intended targets. This level of inaccuracy wasn't just dangerous in terms of collateral damage, but it was horrible in terms of achieving military objectives. This inaccuracy has led to the development of ever more precise munitions, which is still going on today. Learn more about precision munitions and how it's possible to drop a bomb in a pickle barrel on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. When firearms were first invented, they were woefully inaccurate. Early, smooth, bore, muzzle-loaded cannons. would be pointed in the general direction of what you wanted to hit, and then you'd just hope for the best.

Artillery was more a matter of art than science. Over time, however, this got much better, especially with the development of cannons with rifling in the barrel, and the breech-loaded cannon, where you load it with a shell from the rear. It became possible to replicate the conditions of firing more precisely, and artillery became more of a science than an art. By World War I, in particular, artillery became accurate enough that you could land shells in front of advancing infantry and still not fire on your own troops. This, however, wasn't a case of special munitions so much as it was just that artillery and the science of firing it got much better.

The story of precision munitions, however, really begins during World War II. The Second World War introduced the tactic of strategic bombing. And yes, I'm aware that limited Zeppelin bombing occurred during the First World War, but all the combined bombs dropped in that war wouldn't equal a single bombing run of the Second World War. The idea behind Strategic bombing was to attack economic or infrastructure targets to take away an enemy's ability to wage war. Let's say the enemy had a factory that made tanks. If you could bomb that factory and take it out of commission, then the enemy's ability to make new tanks would be inhibited. These types of bombing missions were inherently dangerous. You had to go over enemy territory

and fly very high to avoid being spotted and be out of the range of enemy anti-aircraft guns. Flying at night was safer than flying during the day, but nighttime bombing was horribly inaccurate. Daytime bombing was just plain old inaccurate. As I mentioned in the introduction, at the start of the war, the British had a hard time even getting within five miles of their target. There were efforts made on several fronts to solve this problem. The Americans spent an enormous amount of money on a program known as the Norden bombsight. The Norden bombsite program was second only to the Manhattan Project in terms of investment during the war. The total program amounted to two-thirds of the cost of creating the atomic bomb.

Unlike the A-bomb, however, the Norton bomb site didn't have the same sort of impact on the war. It was supposed to take into consideration altitude, speed, and wind, and, according to supporters, was able to drop a bomb into a pickle barrel at 30,000 feet. It was never close to being that accurate. In a post-war study, the Air Force determined that using the Norton bomb site, only 31.8% of its bombs were able to be dropped within 300 meters, or 1,000 feet of its intended target from 21,000 feet in the air. 300 meters is bigger than most factories that were targeted, and certainly much bigger than

something like a bridge, and that was only 32% of the successful bombs. If you've ever been at a really high height and drop something off the edge, you've probably seen just how hard it is to drop something straight. Even a small gust of wind can take it wildly off course. So just having a good bomb site wasn't good enough. The Germans began developing radio-controlled bombs. Instead of trying to accurately aim, they tried to make a bomb that could be guided to the target. These had an accuracy of about 91 meters, which was far better than what the Allies could achieve through a good bomb site. Basically, the German bomb would fall via gravity like a normal bomb, but a controller in the airplane would

use radio waves to control the fins on the bomb to move it where it needed to be. The average bomb was powerful enough that even one could do incredible damage, assuming that it actually hit the target. Eventually, Allied bombing campaigns moved to area bombing of cities like Dresden and Tokyo, where they didn't really care about accuracy. The goal was just to dump a whole lot of bombs everywhere and cause massive damage. After the war, it became obvious that the solution wasn't going to be better aiming of dumb bombs, it was going to be dropping smarter bombs. The initial German attempts at radio-controlled bombs were not that successful. The Allies also attempted to create a guided weapon in a program that they dubbed Operation Aphrodite. Operation

Aphrodite was an early attempt at a drone airplane. The idea was to take a B-C-Eyed weapon. The idea was to take a B-17 bomber, make it radio-controlled with a television camera, fill it up with explosives, and then crash it into a German bunker. It was not a success. During the Korean War, there were attempts at creating what was known as an electro-optical bomb, which again was just a bomb with a television camera that could be controlled by radio. This too did not work very well. The problem was that the ideas were there, but the technology just couldn't deliver. Missiles were eventually developed in the 1950s that could lock onto objects which admitted heat or radio. waves. The Sidewinder missile was developed by the U.S. Navy in 1956 and deployed by the U.S.

Air Force in 1964. It's an air-to-air missile that was initially locked onto an infrared signature from the exhaust of a jet engine, but subsequently evolved to be an all-aspect missile that could be fired from any direction and doesn't need a heat signature. Likewise, the AGM-45 Shrike missile was designed to lock onto radio waves to take out enemy radar. With the development of the laser in the 1960s, the military identified a possible method of guiding a bomb to its target that didn't involve a television camera. This led to the development of the Bold 117, the world's first laser-guided bomb in 1967. The Bold 117 was developed by Texas Instruments, and it was a regular bomb with a laser

seeker on the nose that controlled the fins of the bomb. It had an accuracy of about 75 feet or 23 meters. It was quickly replaced by a next-generation weapon called the Paveway 1, which had an accuracy of 20 feet or 6.1 meters. There were tests involved during the Vietnam. war, but it never really saw large-scale adoption compared to dumb bombs. And they really could have used it, too, as bombing in Vietnam was also highly inaccurate. There is a classic example that highlighted the need for precision weapons. The Americans identified 27 different bridges that needed to be destroyed in Vietnam. They managed to blow up 26 of the bridges, but the last one, the Thronhoa Bridge, eluded

destruction. Over a period of five years, the Americans flew 871 swords, and the Americans flew 871 sorities and lost 11 aircraft with their crews before the bridge was finally blown up. When it was finally destroyed, they used a laser-guided bomb to do it. These bombs were extremely expensive, as computer chips were not yet cheap nor powerful, which limited their use. In the aftermath of the not-so-successful Vietnam War, the U.S. military did a critical assessment of their entire way of fighting. One of the things that they looked at was developing more and better precision munitions. Despite a few minor uses in the Falkland Islands War of 1982. The first major use of smart weapons was in the 1991 Gulf War.

The vast majority of bombs dropped in this conflict were still dumb bombs. But this time, smart laser-guided weapons made up about 9% of all the bombs dropped. That 9% however was 35 times more effective than the dumb bombs which were dropped. The military claim that the smart bombs dropped during the Gulf War hit their targets 80% of the time. However, those claims are difficult to verify. Some independent military analysts have put the actual success rate at only half that, which would still be overwhelmingly more successful than dumb bombs. The smart bombs used during the Gulf War were almost all of the laser-guided variety. There is one big problem with laser-guided bombs. The person operating the targeting laser has to be able to see the target. If there's

smoke or cloud cover, then they won't work. This problem was solved with the development of satellite-guided munitions. Satellite guided bombs, like the U.S. joint direct attack munition or J-DAM, can be used in any weather condition. They use GPS systems to find their target. It's a system that is designed to be attached at both the nose and the tail to standard dumb bombs. With the advance in technology over the course of just 12 years, the number of smart musicians used in the second Iraq war increased from 8% to 67%. The weakness of satellite guided bombs is that they require the correct input of coordinates, and this became a problem in 1999 when NATO forces accidentally bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, Serbia. Both laser and satellite-guided bombs are still in use today, and they serve different purposes.

Satellite guided bombs are preferred in that you can drop it and forget it. However, lasers can be used by infantry to identify a target, even if they don't know the exact coordinates. They can then radio and aircraft, which can drop a bomb somewhere in the vicinity of where the target is, and let the team on the ground do the rest. These bombs have become so accurate that it has now led to an oddly surprising new kind of weapon, bombs with no explosives. The R9x is a munition that doesn't explode. Instead, it has metal blades that stick out the side, which is why it's been dubbed the Ninja Bomb.

This bomb is designed for extreme pinpoint accuracy, where there would be no collateral damage. One such bomb was used in June of 2020 in an attack on an al-Qaeda leader in Syria. The bomb went through the roof of the vehicle he was in and didn't break the windows on the side. With the success of smart bombs, it was only a matter of time before the technology was brought to even smaller munitions. There are a host of guided projectiles for all sorts of cannons from tanks to ships to artillery. A special note is the M982 Excalibur, 155 millimeter guided artillery shell. These can be launched from any number of cannons and can hit a circle of only four meters in diameter, from a range of 70 kilometers or 43.5 miles.

This is an extremely powerful weapon for counter-artillery. If you can get a target on where the enemy is firing at you, you can just fire one of these and take out their cannon. The problem is that they are really expensive. A normal artillery shell is only a couple hundred dollars. The X-Calibur currently costs around $68,000 per shell. This trend has gone even further, and there are now rumors of guided bullets.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, supposedly, and again this is a rumor, designed a 50-calibur guided bullet that could be used by snipers. It's a laser-guided system with laser coming from the gun itself. Reportedly, when it was tested, a novice was able to hit targets as well as an experienced long-distance marksman, even hitting moving targets. Today, it's estimated there are 57 countries around the world that have precision munitions in their arsenals, and that number is increasing all the time, as countries. modernize and upgrade their armed forces. These weapons dramatically reduce collateral damage by hitting exactly the target which is selected, and they also help solve the problem of unexploded ordinance which can be left over from wars for decades. The downside is that these weapons are still incredibly expensive, but as computing costs come down, the prices of these systems probably

will as well. Precision munitions now allow a single bomb to achieve what thousands of bombs would have been required to do in World War II. It has been one of the biggest areas of military innovation in the last 50 years, and probably will see continued innovation in the decades to come. Everything Everywhere Daily is an Airwave Media podcast. The executive producer is Darcy Adams. The associate producers are Thorne Thompson and Peter Bennett. Today's review comes from listener Rollins 250 over at Apple Podcasts in the United States.

They write, compelling. I'm blown away about how effectively you pare down complex topics to their essentials, and yet make it interesting and compelling. You could probably edit my review to one-third length and still effectively encapsulate my meaning. It feels like I'm listening to a kindred spirit in regards to topics, although I've not been very interested in small island nations until this podcast. Thanks, Rollins 250.

I've been fascinated with tiny countries ever since I used to read about them in the encyclopedia. When I began traveling around the world, I made it a point to visit many of these smaller countries just to see them for myself. There are parts of the world that are often overlooked and forgotten, but I feel that most people should at least be aware of them. Remember, if you leave a review or send me a boostagram, you too can have it read on the show.