ST. LOUIS • On a stage at Boeing, a charismatic Air Force pilot dressed in a flight suit told an auditorium full of executives, engineers and suppliers how impressed he was with the precision-guided bombs they help make.
“I have been fortunate or unfortunate — depending on how you think about it — to employ these in training and combat,” said Maj. Mike “Pako” Benitez.
He was speaking about joint direct attack munition, or JDAM, which converts conventional “dumb” bombs into guided “smart” bombs. The computerized tail fin kits are slapped onto warheads weighing 500, 1,000 and 2,000 pounds.
Fitted with GPS, the $25,000 gizmos make bombs so accurate pilots like to say they can drive in nails from far away.
The air-to-surface munitions have dramatically changed war since production began in the late 1990s beside the Missouri River in St. Charles. The military needed a coordinate-seeking bomb that could be dropped during all weather conditions with minimal collateral damage, for example, on a row of apartments in a metropolitan area.
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Boeing answered with JDAMs, which are being used a lot today, as coalition forces rely much less on ground troops and more on airstrikes in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq. The meeting this week between operators and builders was called to celebrate a production milestone and to mark a new goal to make 36,500 JDAMs a year, up from 8,000 in mid-2015.
As Benitez explained, once released from his fighter jet, it takes about 30 seconds — as long as he can hold his breath — for the JDAM to glide five miles to the fixed target. Lasers are used on the devices to hit moving objects.
“There’s a lot of things that run through my mind having that great responsibility to employ this weapon on a particular target,” said Benitez, about to draw applause. “The one thing I have never thought about is if the JDAM will work.”
To demonstrate in his presentation, Benitez narrated the scene of a silent video playing on an overhead screen. A coalition convey had been shot at in Afghanistan. Smoke from an artillery round marked the enemy position way up on a hilltop. An enormous explosion eliminated the threat.
Playing the video back in slow motion, the glimpse of a 2,000-pound black dart was seen piercing the skyline at 750 feet per second. The pilot chose to detonate the bomb about 20 feet above ground, to cover more area. The blast unleashed a 700-ton-per-square-inch punch of molten metal at its center point that burned to 7,000 degrees.
Benitez turned to the silent crowd of 70 people.
“And that is what you guys do,” he said.
Rebuilding stockpiles
Boeing recently announced that it had made 300,000 JDAMs in the past two decades. They were sold to 28 countries, but the U.S. government is the largest customer, having dropped 60,000 of them in combat.
“It is by far the weapon of choice,” Brig. Gen. Shaun Q. Morris, in charge of all munitions fired from the air for the U.S. Air Force, told the Post-Dispatch.
But he said it had been used in excess of production. In 2016 alone, the Air Force dropped about 15,000 JDAMs. Last weekend, he said, 243 were used, some of them against jihadist in Mosul.
A New York Times report from a photographer embedded with the Iraqi Army seemed to speak to this.
“Though much of the worst fighting was over, the soldiers were still on alert for suicide car bombers, a fear well founded,” . “Occasionally, a radio would crackle with news that a car bomber had been spotted nearby. After a few tense minutes, we would hear the sound of a missile fired by a coalition warplane and the car exploding.”
showed footage of a tunnel system the Iraqi Army discovered. Militants had spray painted on the walls as a reminder: “Watch out for jets.”
One week earlier, two B-2 stealth bombers from Whiteman Air Force Base in western Missouri flew half way across the globe, with the help of multiple , to hit desert targets in Libya with about 100 JDAMs, . In 1999, B-2s from Missouri were the first to use JDAMs in combat when they dropped the munitions during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.
In May, Boeing won a $3.2 billion contract to make JDAM guidance kits for the U.S. government through September 2020. Production goals are expected to reach 150 a day by July, up from 40 a day less than two years ago.
“We expect to sustain that rate for some amount of time, not only to support ongoing operations but also to rebuild our stockpiles,” Morris said.
Evolution of bombs, holy war
Eliot Cohen, former Counselor of the U.S. State Department, said the military was in a new era of warfare that was about routine and relatively cheap precision.
“That’s the advantage of the JDAM over more expensive cruise missiles,” said Cohen, who now teaches at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
“We’re clearly dropping a lot of them, because we are engaged in three wars: Iraq, Afghanistan, and against various jihad movements. Our land forces may have drawn down, but effectively we are the Iraqi and Afghan air forces, as well as our own.”
Paul Rogers, who teaches in the department of peace studies at Bradford University in England, warned that radical religious movements could be impermeable to smart bombs.
For instance, a former most-wanted terrorist in Iraq was killed by a precision-guided bomb in 2006. At the time, Al-Qaeda in Iraq confirmed his death, yet it vowed to continue its “holy war.”
“We want to give you the joyous news of the martyrdom of the mujahed sheik Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,” their statement said then.
“In the short term, it appears to work, ISIS is in retreat,” Rogers said about JDAMs’ being dropped more recently in Mosul. “But what will probably happen is they will tend to go underground and not engage in open conflict and be subject to air raids. They will probably put more of a focus on staging attacks overseas, as they have been doing in Europe and other places.”
Mistakes and collateral damage still happen. In 2½ years of coalition airstrikes in Libya, Iraq and Syria, an estimated 2,300 civilians have been killed, , which tracks the numbers. U.S. government estimates are much lower.
Still, precision-guided munitions are significantly more accurate than free fall “dumb” bombs. JDAMs are tested to 95 percent accuracy — striking within 30 feet of the intended target. By comparison, most of the 2.7 million tons of bombs the Allies dropped on Europe in World War II missed their marks. , only 20 percent of daytime “precision” raids fell within the 1,000-foot target area
“What JDAM gives us in a level of precision with the ability to minimize collateral damage, which really, in today’s warfare, are complete imperatives,” Morris said. “The only drawback we have today is we don’t have enough of them.”
Greg Coffey, director of JDAM programs at Boeing, said during a tour of the nondescript assembly plant in St. Charles that they were currently running two shifts and didn’t anticipate hiring more employees to meet the higher production goals. The $105 billion air and space behemoth wouldn’t say how many people worked there.
“We will grow to whatever the demand of the customer is,” he said.