Weaponeering

One of the more fun things to do when you plan to go out and blow stuff up is to decide what to do it with. The process of doing this is called weaponeering. You are engineering a solution as to which weapon will do the job satisfactorily. The first consideration in this exercise is usually taken care of for you. In the real world you will have an assigned mission from some form of higher command. This mission will have an objective or target thats already been decided on. You rarely if ever get to pick your target in the real world. The target will be determined by someone else, and you will also be told when to attack it. A lot of this will depend on the tactical situation and what stage hostilities are at. Suffice it to say you ain't got a lot of choice in the matter.

Once you get your target, it's time to do some serious study. I used to use what I called an inside out approach, but you can do it any way you like. It made the process easier for me. Inside out meant I worked from the target and then moved out considering things that would affect my planning as I went. First things first; what are we going to destroy today? Target type is going to drive a lot of your weapon selection. Sometimes you may be told which weapon to use also, but that is not the norm. What is my target, and what exactly do I need to destroy it with? That's the first question you should ask. We used to have an actual manual that would tell you how many bombs it would take to blow up just about anything. It gave a probability of kill or Psub K, (also pK) for just about any combination of weapons you could come up with. You then select the weapon type and how many aircraft you need to do the job. That would be the next step. How many bombs do I need to put on target, with reasonable accuracy in order to get the desired effect. Oh well I want to wipe it from the face of the earth right??? Not necessarily my eager friend! It cost money to drop bombs. We want to do only what the higher command authority requested. We probably don't have to destroy a whole town to take out the radio station, or we don't have to blow up every road when the only bridge into town will do. Get it? Another thing to consider is; do I need to destroy the target, or just put it out of commission for a while? You've probably heard the terms "hard kill" and "soft kill". This is what they are referring to. For instance, we might only have to deny the use of a runway for a few hours in order to allow for an invasion or a separate air strike if fighters or bombers are based there. Or maybe we need the runway and we want to just kill aircraft on the ground. It can get complicated, but the objective is clear most of the time.

So once we decide what we are gonna use, we need to think about how we are going to use it. What type delivery will be appropriate for the terrain, the weather, and the immediate threat around the target. High altitude will keep you out of the AAA threat. It may also put you in SAM envelopes! Intelligence is paramount and your strikes success depends a lot on accurate and timely intel. It's important in a lot of simulations to do good target study. Take notes and draw pictures if you have to. Those maps and screens won't be available while your flying at low altitude over unfriendly terrain! A low altitude ingress will negate a lot of the SAM threat but makes you vulnerable to AAA unless you can gain surprise or use the terrain until very close to the target. Standoff weapons have significantly different parameters for release than dumb bombs so this needs to be taken into account. This brings up the next big issue. Once we have decided a tactic and a mission profile to get us to the target with our bombs, we have to figure out how far we can go on a tank of gas. Again we turn to the manuals for drag indexes and fuel burns for different profiles and pick one that best suits our needs. In a flight sim, most missions will be planned for you, but its still something to think about. Tanking assets and their availability can really help give you some flexibility here. All this will be driven by the threat. How many fighter aircraft can they field during your mission window? What kind of support do we need to accomplish this? What threat exists in the immediate target area? This all gets into Strike planning, which is another topic, but you can see how this is all driven by what we are going to do with our bombs.

Ok, we have a weapon, we know how many aircraft needed complete our objective. We have come up with a tactic to deliver the weapons on the target, which has driven our mission profile. Hey Hornit! What's a mission profile?? Ok, you asked, here it is in a nutshell. A mission profile is simply a plan to get you to the target(ingress), drop the weapons, exit the target area (egress), and return to base safely. It involves a selection of altitudes for each phase of the mission. For instance....we have to go high initially to save fuel, drop down to low altitude to defeat the threat and drop bombs, then go high again on the way home for fuel. We would call this a Hi-Lo-Hi profile. If your close to the target, say in a Harrier or an A10 doing CAS (Combat Air Support) you might stay low the whole time hence it would be a Lo-Lo-Lo profile. Easy right? Your mission profile is very important and its what is going to dictate tactics for you and any support aircraft.

There are some other things to think about now. The target will dictate what type of weapon. With this its really important to use the right type of fusing to get the desired results. Do I want the bomb to blow up just above the target, or maybe just as it goes through the roof of say a hangar full of aircraft? Or maybe I want it to bury itself 10 feet into the concrete of a runway or taxiway. Again we use our manuals to find the proper hardware to use. Another thing to consider is spacing of the weapons. Do I want tight little group, or do I want a 700 foot long string of overlapping fragments? As you can see....it ain't as easy as loading up as many of your biggest bombs as you can and heading out.

A lot of the flight simulators have some pretty good reference sections on weapons. Use this tool and think a bit before you select what you need. Also A great source of information is the internet along with forums, newsgroups and simulation sites that have places you can ask specific questions about this stuff. You just might find me in one or two of them too! Sometimes a little corporate knowledge about a sim can go a long way to easing frustration too. They don't always get it right when it comes to weapons simulation and realistic destruction of targets. For the most part, it's pretty realistic with Sims like the Flanker series, Falcon 4, and Jane''s F18. It's important to take some time and do some thinking even in these sims. The weapons you have by default may not be the best for the job all the time. It can also affect your resources if your in a campaign situation where you have a finite number of certain kinds of weapons. Use the cheap plentiful stuff when you can. You don't want to run out of the "uber" weapons early in the campaign!

Hope you picked up a few tips here, and realize its not quite as simple as one might think. I've just scratched the surface really, but it will make you a better strike fighter pilot in the long run. Keep the shiny side up!

Jim "Hornit" Campisi