Source By Carl Hamilton

COPENHAGEN, Denmark: Observers might have noticed several questions and answers on Quora and even in the news, talking about Russia’s dwindling stocks of precision guided munitions (PGM).

A lot of people are seemingly under the impression that the west has a monopoly on their production. This is far from the truth, which is that Russia does use PGM, and they do so when it is necessary. But let us talk about the use of PGM in the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Why were PGM made in the first place?

Air forces have always wanted to be able to guarantee hits when attacking ground targets. In WW2 air forces often claimed fantastical kills against tanks, but in reality hit maybe 2 percent of armored targets or less. A pretty poor accuracy rating. Hitting a small target with a dumb bomb with no help is approaching pure luck.

In the 1960s technology began to allow for correction of weapons to allow for a higher accuracy strikes, one such example is the American Walleye, which remained the primary American PGM for quite a while. This bomb allowed a pilot to lock a target they could see, and the bomb would make corrections in flight.

However, this still required the pilot to see the target, and also to calculate the trajectory of the bomb himself, as it doesn’t matter how much you correct, if the bomb doesn’t have the energy to get to the target. In 1975 the Walleye was updated with system to allow hitting targets out of visual sight.

The Soviets focused more on missiles than guided bombs, such as the Kh-23 and Kh-25, of which many versions exist. The Soviets tended to favor laser guidance. Again this was done simply to have a way to hit individual targets.

But such targets were generally not tanks, but entire buildings. For example many walleyes in Viet Nam were dropped to hit a bridge, and many of them still missed. By todays standard, a CEP so low that you can’t hit a major building for sure isn’t very precise. Today both the USA and Russia are able to produce extreme precision missiles.

PGM guidance systems use one of the following systems: Laser guidance, optical guidance, satellite guidance, infrared guidance, radiation guidance or inertial guidance (Usually ballistic). Laser, Optical and IR all require a visual lock, either from the pilot or a spotter. These are the type of weapons that Russia isn’t using much in Ukraine.

Sometimes you don’t want accuracy

If you are trying to hit a single vehicle inside a city, without hitting much else, a hellfire is a great weapon for that. This requires you have a drone that can unmolested fly above the target follow it and such for a prolonged period of time. This is what the US have done a lot all over the planet.

However, the war in Ukraine are not people hanging around outside not fighting back. The Ukrainian army are generally in well fortified positions, inside trenches, and those trenches are often inside forests. You cannot see much from above due to the forest, but you know that this entire area is full of enemies.

Does it make any sense to use a highly expensive PGM to hit individual areas that might have a soldier? Or does it make more sense to bomb the entire area where you know there are many spread out enemies, and destroy as much of their fortification as possible? Obviously it is option two. For this, you don’t need PGM, you need many bombs. And if those bombs spread out of a small area, that’s great, this is actually what you want.

Doctrine, SVP-24 and the other solution to air bombing

As I said, PGM were made as a solution to the inherent inaccuracy of air bombing, however, we should talk about ballistic computers, because this what most people don’t seem to understand. A computer is installed in most modern aircraft which allows for hitting targets with dumb bombs quite a bit more accurately than guessing using CCIP or CCRP. For a pilot this shows either where a bomb will hit when doing a bombing run, or a predetermined release point to drop bombs for a target already set.

These ballistic computers already did this during the cold war, with quite old computer technology, MiG-27 the original variant already had this. Now the Americans went very deep into the PGM production, particularly once JDAM became available and Paveway as well. In a serious conflict where any level of precision is desired it is expected that NATO forces will drop nothing but PGM.

Contrary to this, Russia never abandoned the idea of area bombing in serious conflict, a choice which now seems correct. But more than that, when you have millions of conventional bombs, why just give them up?

Russia has spent a lot more time on developing ways to improve CCIP and CCRP for ballistic computers, than on making new PGMs. The computer is the most expensive part of a PGM, and consider that every time you launch a PGM you lose this computer. While a ballistic computer in the plane is not lost, and with modern computing it can be very sophisticated.

Enter the SVP-24, this is a multi data combination ballistic computer. While a traditional ballistic computer calculates impact points from the plane, the SVP-24 can calculate a lot more than this. The SVP-24 is able to take data from a variety of sources outside the plane, like humidity and wind, collected from ground units.

Additionally target data can be send directly to the SVP-24 from forward observer posts, the target will simply show up for the pilot, as the data is entirely automated. A pilot no longer even needs to acquire and lock their targets, even with the dumbest bombs. There are people out there who can explain the capabilities of the SVP-24 better than I can.

This fire control system, is also not only limited to new planes like the Su-34. It can be fitted to almost anything, including old MiG-27 or even helicopters like the Mi-28 and Ka-52. And we know it has been. Ka-52s in Ukraine have been seen doing something I have never seen before. The SVP-24 calculates where to fire rockets in an indirect envelope. This allows Ka-52 helicopters to fire rocket pods like artillery at night, and have a very reasonable spread of rockets.

Advantages and cost of war

The attack profile of the Ka-52 above has some very obvious advantages, which can be seen in nearly all the combat footage from Ukraine. The Ka-52 and Su-25 rocket runs, fly very low to the ground, to avoid detection and attack by Ukrainian air defenses (As of June at least 1 Ukrainian S-300P battery is still operational near Donbass).

You will also see the Su-25 flying with fuel pods, essentially they can loiter near the battlefield, and when a target is found by ground forces, it appears via SVP-24, and two Su-25s within minutes or even seconds will deliver 40–80 rockets on target without ever having to get a line of sight to the target.

Unlike a BM-21 grad system which could do a similar thing, Su-25s and Ka-52s will never be hit by counter battery artillery, and might deliver it’s payload more suddenly as well.

We should also bear in mind, just how cheap this is. S-8 rockets are dirt cheap. S-13 rockets are dirt cheap. Dumb bombs are dirt cheap. PGM are highly expensive. JDAM cost at least 25,000 dollars per unit. While a Mark 82 bomb cost 2,000 dollars. That means 93% of a JDAM is the guidance system. That matters. A lot.

By 2020, apparently 430,000 JDAMs had been produced. That is over 10 billion dollars in guidance kits for bombs alone. If the US had to use JDAMs for everything in Ukraine in Russia’s position, they would be having quite a bit of a problem with PGM shortage themselves. Now consider that the US dropped over 70,000 PGM on ISIS in Syria alone.

This was such a problem for the US, that they announced they had run out of Hellfire missiles, and had a general shortage of PGM. This was not in a war against a major adversary, the US had a PGM shortage simply by fighting ISIS. As such, is it any wonder that Russia doesn’t just throw PGM at anything that moves in Ukraine?

It would be a terrible waste, that doesn’t mean that Russia doesn’t have PGMs as we discussed, Russian ATGM, Cruise missiles, and laser guided artillery shells are used all the time. And except for cruise and ballistic missiles, their guidance systems might be simpler, but cheaper and still completely able to carry out their mission.

Russian SVP-24 and their focus on increasing the accuracy of dumb weapons by having better fire control systems, rather than putting more expensive FCS inside munitions, is a logical choice, and completely necessary for a war like in Ukraine.

PGMs are reserved for high value targets, and it is doubtful with current western production that they would have been able to keep up a PGM campaign of the scale they are imagining in Ukraine either.