However, some American units will inevitably need to close with their foes, especially tactical aircraft which otherwise wouldn’t have the range to contribute to operations. The authors note that it would be most efficient to have these forces disperse and provide air cover to protect the bombers and intercept incoming enemy strikes.

Protecting these non-stealth assets is mostly a matter of reforming security for the bases from which they operate, whether that’s adopting new air defense protocols for carrier strike groups, moving towards highly mobile forward area refueling points for jump jets like the new F-35B or reorganizing forward positioned airbases into a series of smaller complexes that would each have to be eliminated to knock out the facility.

Even with fighter cover, stealth bombers penetrating contested airspace could have trouble approaching targets due to the growing sophistication of ground based defenses. Stealth isn’t invisibility: given powerful detection and enough time, the bombers can be located and engaged. This is problematic as 96 percent of all American PGMs are direct attack weapons with ranges under 50 nm. Large cruise missiles with ranges exceeding 400 nm comprise most of the remainder. While these sorts of missiles are useful on ships and non-stealthy aircraft that need to stand off from enemy defenses, they are bulky, limiting their utility on bombers and making them easier to destroy mid-flight.

Gunzinger and Clark believe focusing production in these two areas is inefficient, as weapons with a range between 100 and 400 nm fall into a “sweet spot” where the tradeoffs between range, weight, and cost are optimized. Bombers could carry large numbers of these relatively cheap missiles and fire them from a comfortable standoff range without exposing aircrews to the heaviest air defenses.

Toward a New Generation of Short Range Standoff PGM:

Currently, the U.S. arsenal only contains one weapon in this category: the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile (JASSM). The report advocates both ramping up production of the JASSM and developing additional weapons to present a variety of threats to the enemy. After all, a platform is only as effective as the ordinance it can deliver. Rather than focus on a few exquisite tomahawks, we should design weapons with the “small, smart, and many” concept in mind.

The ultimate goal would be a “tunneling attack.” Imagine a force of stealthy assets like submarines and stealth bombers unleashing a surprise swarm of such small weapons over a narrow front. With short flight times and smaller airframes, it would be much harder to engage these weapons mid-flight compared with a Tomahawk swarm. The air defense system would be temporarily overwhelmed, paving the way for more capable follow-on attacks launched by surface ships or aircraft to penetrate in successive waves through the newly opened tunnel.

There are a host of emerging technologies that could make this tactic more effective. Most promising is an idea advocated by Gunzinger and Clark of creating inter-weapon networks that could build on existing JASSM datalinks to allow the missiles to collaborate and redirect midflight, a technology that could drop the number of weapons needed to engage a target set by a factor of ten. Other weapons seem straight out of science fiction, from hypersonic missiles to high-energy microwave weapons that can disable swaths of enemy electronics to cluster weapons with “brilliant submunitions” that can loiter over an area for hours before engaging.

Such programs are promising, but they currently languish in the science and technology research phase instead of moving forward to low-rate production. Munitions aren’t a hot button topic like platforms—less than half a percent of the defense budget is allocated to PGM procurement and development. Gunzinger and Clark paint a picture of an industrial base reliant on a slew of subcontractors who essentially craft their parts by hand, and thus have very little ability to surge production. But retooling production to focus on “short range standoff” weapons need not be as daunting as it seems. Many direct attack PGM can simply bemodified with short burn rocket engines to extend their range past 100 nm. Nevertheless, any shift in PGM production is not politically expedient, as direct attack smart bombs are useful in low-intensity conflicts like the fight against the self-proclaimed Islamic State. Deemphasizing the long-term relevance of a currently useful weapons program, as the Pentagon has already learned with the A-10, is a difficult sell.

The future, however, does not stand still. If the same hesitation toward munitions development had existed twenty years ago, PGM may never have evolved from the humble Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) gravity bomb to Block IV Tomahawk cruise missiles that can accurately deliver a half-ton warhead over a distance of 700 nautical miles. It’s hard to imagine how the campaigns of the last decade would have proceeded without precision strike—or what other conflicts could have arisen without PGM’s utility as a deterrent. Yet, based on current trends, it’s easy to envision a future in which the U.S. military cedes its advantage in strike because it failed to adapt to a changing environment. As the Pentagon grapples for a third offset strategy, no tool should be overlooked, and nothing should be taken for granted.

This piece first appeared in CFR’s blog Defense in Depth here.

Image: Flickr/Creative Commons.