Home > Precision-guided munition
Precision-guided munitions (smart munitions or smart bombs) are self-guiding weapons intended to maximize damage to the target while minimizing " collateral damage". Because the damage effects of an explosive weapon scale as a power law with distance, quite modest improvements in accuracy (and hence reduction in miss distance) enables a target to be effectively attacked with much smaller bombs. Thus, even if the bomb misses, collateral damage is greatly reduced. The creation of precision-guided munitions resulted in the renaming of older bombs as " gravity bombs", "dumb bombs" or "iron bombs".Ironically, despite the greater precision of precision-guided weapons, the failure of their guidance systems can cause greater damage than a miss from an ordinary bomb. Misses from older, unguided munitions are generally normally distributed around the aim point. Thus it can be assumed that the further you are from the target, the safer you are. On the other hand, most smart bomb misses are caused by system failures – a jammed steering fin, computer failure, loss of homing signal, etc. In this case, the weapon is actually more likely to miss the target by a very large distance, than by a small distance.
1 Types of precision-guided munitions
1.1 Radio-controlled weapons
The United States Army began experimenting with radio-controlled remotely guided planes in the First World War, but the program had few successes. The first successful experiments with guided bombs were conducted during World War II when television-guided bombs, flare sighted bombs and other steerable munitions were developed. The Germans developed several types of steerable munitions, such as the Fritz X. There was even an attempt to produce a glider bomb that was released from a larger plane over the target, but the program stopped with the nuclear attacks in Japan.
1.2 Visually-guided weapons
The programs started again in the Korean War, where the political ramifications of nuclear war would have been unthinkable. In the 1960s, the electro-optical bomb or "fire and forget" camera bomb was introduced. They were equipped with television cameras and steerable flare sights, in which the bomb would be steered until the flare superimposed the target. The camera bombs transmitted a "bomb's eye view" of the target back to a controlling aircraft. An operator in this aircraft then transmitted control signals to steerable fins fitted to the bomb. Such weapons were used increasingly by the USAF in the last few years of the Vietnam War because the political climate was increasingly intolerant of collateral damage.
1.3 Laser-guided weapons
In 1962, the US Army began research into laserFor alternative meanings see laser (disambiguation). A laser light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation is a device which uses a quantum mechanical effect, stimulated emission, to generate a coherent beam of light. Light from a laser is often guidance systems and by 1967 the USAF had conducted a competitive evaluation leading to full development of the world's first laser guided bomb - the BOLT-117The Texas Instruments BOLT-117 (BOmb, Laser Terminal-117) was the world's first laser guided bomb (LGB). It consisted of a standard 750-pound bomb case with a KMU-342 laser guidance and control kit. It was commissioned by the United States Air Force in 19 - in 1968Events Undated Booker Prize for Fiction is established by Booker plc. 1968 is known as the year of the Prague Spring and also the year of the Paris riots. The ASCII character code is standardized as ANSI Standard X3. Nauru adopt his national anthem of the. All such bombs work in much the same way, relying on the target being illuminated, or "painted", by a laser "target designator" on the ground or on an aircraft. They have the significant disadvantage of not being usable in poor weather conditions where the target illumination cannot be seen, or where it is not possible to get a target designator near the target. The laser designator sends its beam in a series of encryptedThis article is about algorithms for encryption and decryption. For an overview of cryptographic technology related to encryption, see cryptography. In cryptography, encryption is the process of obscuring information to make it unreadable without special pulses so that the bomb cannot be confused by an ordinary laser.
Laser-guided weapons did not become commonplace until the advent of the microchip. They were used, though not on a large scale, by the BritishThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a state in Western Europe, usually known simply as the United Kingdom the UK Britain or less accurately as Great Britain . The UK was formed by a series of Acts of Union which united the formerly forces during the 1982 Falklands WarThe Falklands War or the Malvinas War ( Spanish: Guerra de las Malvinas , was an armed conflict between Argentina and the United Kingdom over the Falkland Islands (Spanish: Islas Malvinas between March and June 1982. Though surprised by an Argentine attac. The first large-scale use of smart weapons came in 19911991 like 2002, is a palindromic year. It also has the same calendar as 2002, including Easter on March 31. It is a common year starting on Tuesday. Events January January 2 Sharon Pratt Dixon is sworn in as mayor of Washington, DC becoming the first blac during Operation Desert Storm when they were used by coalition forces against Iraq. Even so, most of the air-dropped ordnance used in that war was of the "dumb" kind. Laser-guided weapons were used in large numbers during the 1999 Kosovo War, but their effectiveness was often reduced by the poor weather conditions prevalent in the southern Balkans.
