The Artillery needs large quantities of PGMs for more accurate targeting in future battles. PGMs are increasingly gaining currency to accurately destroy critical hard targets quickly as well as to reduce collateral damage. With a larger quantity of PGMs, the employment of Artillery itself will undergo a drastic change.

A precision-guided munition (PGM) also termed as “smart munition”, is a guided munition intended to precisely hit a specific target and to minimise collateral damage. It is well known that the damage effects of explosive weapons fall off with distance. Thus even modest improvements in accuracy enable a target to be effectively attacked with fewer or smaller bombs. The creation of precision-guided munitions resulted in the renaming of older bombs as “gravity bombs”, “dumb bombs” or “iron bombs”.

Advantages of PGMs

Precision munitions give a decision-maker the confidence of contemplating the use of force in circumstances where collateral damage would be unacceptable or call into question the viability of continued military action and hence may preclude the use of force as an option. Thus precision technologies have been used to design munitions which could be employed to overcome such inhibitions.

In low intensity conflict operations like counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism and even in high intensity conventional conflicts, attitudes towards own and enemy causalities have changed. This has come about because of negative publicity regarding the use of heavy weaponry which results in a large number of civilian causalities and which has serious implications for public opinion and policy. This is more so in democratic countries where the political leadership is often at pains to explain the necessity of use of force. Moreover, due to availability of excellent communications worldwide, it is not possible to hide excesses anywhere and in a seamless world, adverse global opinion can have an adverse impact both internally and externally.

Changed Nature of Warfare

Additionally, wars and warfare have changed considerably. It is in this context that Richard P. Hallon in his article “Precision-guided Munitions and the New Era of Warfare” (ASPC Paper No. 53) states, “There has been a generalised lack of appreciation of how warfare has changed since the Second World War. On the eve of the Gulf War, for example, critics of proposed military action posited scenarios where tens of thousands of Iraqis would be killed by largely indiscriminate air attacks that would ‘carpet bomb’ population centres, particularly Baghdad. To give viewers some idea of what a ‘modern’ air war might be like, commentators, ironically, ran footage of Berlin and other German cities after Victory in Europe (VE) Day. In fact, of course, coalition leaders had no intention whatsoever of using such a level of force against an opponent, recognising that given the moral climate of the present day; this use of power simply would not be tolerated by the world community, or even the population of a coalition nation that engaged in such action. But after being briefed on the air campaign plan for the Gulf War, coalition political and military leaders were very comfortable with the notion of using precision weapons in attacks deep in the midst of major cities, once they had been assured that the accuracies claimed for such weapons were realistic and not the stuff of an overenthusiastic trade-show sales briefing. On the ‘opening night’ of the Gulf War, for example, Baghdad was struck by two kinds of precision-attackers: ship-launched cruise missiles and air-launched laser-guided bombs. Later, the extensive use of precision weaponry in the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) air campaign in Bosnia without (to the author’s knowledge) any collateral losses, affirmed again that this kind of attack offers decision-makers an option to exert force in circumstances that just two decades ago, they would not have considered possible.”

The capability of launching precision attacks via drones flying overhead has been fully exploited by the US in Afghanistan and Pakistan where Predators (unmanned combat aerial vehicle (UCAVs)) with Hellfire missiles have been employed extensively to get at Taliban and Al-Qaeda leaders who otherwise would have been inaccessible. Thus, decision-makers now have a freedom to use military force in built up areas (cities and towns), in an enemy homeland or in enemy-occupied territory without risking their own troops and without the fear of causing collateral damage.

Air and Space Aspects

With the advent of precision-guided munitions combined with accurate reconnaissance, surveillance and target acquisition systems and global positioning system (GPS)-aided navigation systems; modern technology has given airpower the capability of destroying targets with single digit circular error probability (CEP) and with least amount of collateral damage. Given the wherewithal, these characteristics endow airpower with the ability to psychologically and physically imbalance an opponent and achieve strategic aims set by the national leadership with highly selective employment of land forces. The effects are fundamentally greater than before. Airpower has become the decisive force in war, allowing airpower to shape the battlefield before the ground forces. In high-intensity combat, the main role of land forces would now be to secure a victory, rather than achieve it.

It is becoming increasingly evident that in the long-term, manned fighters will give way to unmanned combat. The transition from operating UAVs as sensor platform to employing them as weapons carriers is seen by analysts as the logical outcome of the available technologies and the extensive use of Predators mounted with Hellfire missiles in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region, proves the efficacy of this concept. The US Air Force has armed its Predator and Global Hawk UAVs with precision weapons. The US Congress has mandated that a third of all US deep-strike aircraft in the future will be unmanned. In the future, manned fighters may be used for only a limited number of roles, whereas stealthy unmanned combat aircraft, together with low-observable long-range stand-off munitions, will lessen the need for manned aircraft to penetrate enemy defences. These factors raise the question of whether and for how long manned aircraft will be needed for the delivery of precision-guided munitions.

Military experts predict that space will become an actual theatre of military operations. Currently, it is felt that space operations could involve everything from protecting military satellites to knocking out enemy space-borne threats and denying adversaries the same opportunities in space. Future threats to satellite systems could include satellites armed with lasers, as well as electronic jamming devices and viruses that could shut down the flow of information.