I don’t think the US included effective electronic countermeasures into their equation.
If 1 HIMARS Excalibur round with a 10m CEP can hit can hit a target that would otherwise take 40+ dumb 122 mm rocket artillery rounds with a 200m CEP, you can get away with way fewer rounds.
But after a month or so when the enemy updates their ECM and that Excalibur has a 100m CEP, suddenly you need 10 $150,000 excaliburs, and might as well go back to using 100+ $500-$5000 dumb 155mm shells.
This puts the famous RF focus on jamming into perspective for me. I always just viewed it as an in-the-moment countermeasure by whoever’s being targeted, but I realize now that it’s an active strategy of attrition warfare. Our MIC is built around extracting maximum profit per unit rather than pumping out maximum units. So the jamming of very expensive special weapons has the downstream effect of depleting all the cheaper generalist weapons as well. Every Eaglepatriotshadow missile that whiffs also means hundreds of dumbrockets fired to make up the difference, and those things can’t be replaced quickly anymore. Nothing can.
Circular error probable (CEP), also circular error probability or circle of equal probability, is a measure of a weapon system’s precision in the military science of ballistics. It is defined as the radius of a circle, centered on the aimpoint, that is expected to enclose the landing points of 50% of the rounds; said otherwise, it is the median error radius. That is, if a given munitions design has a CEP of 100 m, when 100 munitions are targeted at the same point, an average of 50 will fall within a circle with a radius of 100 m about that point.
CEP concept and hit probability. 0.2% outside the outmost circle.
I don’t think the US included effective electronic countermeasures into their equation.
If 1 HIMARS Excalibur round with a 10m CEP can hit can hit a target that would otherwise take 40+ dumb 122 mm rocket artillery rounds with a 200m CEP, you can get away with way fewer rounds.
But after a month or so when the enemy updates their ECM and that Excalibur has a 100m CEP, suddenly you need 10 $150,000 excaliburs, and might as well go back to using 100+ $500-$5000 dumb 155mm shells.
This puts the famous RF focus on jamming into perspective for me. I always just viewed it as an in-the-moment countermeasure by whoever’s being targeted, but I realize now that it’s an active strategy of attrition warfare. Our MIC is built around extracting maximum profit per unit rather than pumping out maximum units. So the jamming of very expensive special weapons has the downstream effect of depleting all the cheaper generalist weapons as well. Every Eaglepatriotshadow missile that whiffs also means hundreds of dumbrockets fired to make up the difference, and those things can’t be replaced quickly anymore. Nothing can.
I didn’t know what this was, so:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_error_probable
Please note I was pulling most of the numbers out of my ass to illustrate the concept.
Oh I didn’t take those literally, I’d just never heard of CEP and I figured I wasn’t alone!