Command: Modern Operations Bombing Tests Part 1

I've long wanted to do an analysis of how bomb accuracy has changed over the last 80 years or so, and how this impacts the cost of destroying a target from the air. The problem has always been that all of the data I need, from bomb accuracy to the cost of flying the planes, is scattered and sparse, and so I haven't really made much progress. But a recent comment from cassander inspired me to give it a try in Command: Modern Operations, which is basically a medium-level simulation package that is sold on Steam. I've used it for other experiments, and it could give at least a fairly reasonable number for how many bombs it takes from a given platform/delivery mechanism to destroy a generic target.

The basic setup I used for all of these tests was fairly simple. I set up a grid of 10 medium buildings (130' x 80') in CMO and then on the opposite side set up a nearby airbase with 12 planes of the type under test. All were given the same loadout (usually the heaviest one for the weapon in question) and set up to attack one at a time, using only one bomb at a time on a given target to prevent overkill from messing up my numbers. I would run the scenario until either all of the targets were destroyed or all of the planes had flown their sorties. Variables included the plane, the weapon, attack altitude and environmental conditions (day/night and weather).

For my first test, I ran a simple scenario: a modern fighter (Super Hornet) using dumb bombs, able to attack as low as it liked, with no weather conditions or other problems. The results were pretty straightforward:

So at this point, it's probably worth talking a bit about methodology. I'm going to count as a hit any bomb which does damage to the target, which can include both direct hits (16 of the 27 here, and, yes, many buildings survived direct hits) and bombs that don't hit directly but still do damage. Average miss counts the distance as 0 for direct hits, which is obviously somewhat optimistic (the target does have dimensions, so add maybe 25-30' to get actual CEP). For the next run, let's use the same loadout, but raise the altitude to 12,000', the sort of altitude you'd use if you wanted to avoid being shot at with MANPADS and guys with rifles.

Obviously, performance this time was significantly worse, with a lot of the bombs falling so far wide that they did no damage, although there were also 12 direct hits on the 10 buildings, which strongly suggests that the direct hits do the vast majority of the damage, an impression confirmed by later tests. That said, this one took long enough that several of the buildings were only damaged by the bombs and ultimately destroyed by fire. But the obvious next question is how this would work with bigger bombs, so I replaced the Mk 82s (500 lb) with Mk 83s (1000 lb) and ran the scenario again.

We see slightly better performance here, mostly due to the greater lethal radius of the bombs. In terms of total tonnage, it took slightly more Mk 83s, but fewer sorties because there were more bombs per plane. But it's also worth going up the final step and seeing what happens if we use 2000 lb Mk 84s.

This was the clear winner in terms of number of bombs required, although relative to the Mk 83, 6 sorties were required rather than 5 because the plane could only carry half of the bomb load. But with that baseline out of the way, I think I'm going to go with the Mk 83 for further tests with factors that could affect unguided bombs. First, I'll get a low-altitude baseline for comparison in various conditions:

It's worth noting that the low-level attack with Mk 83s required only about half the bombs that the Mk 82 version did, largely because the bombs were far more likely to destroy the building in a single hit. This definitely confirms the decision to use the Mk 83 as my standard test bomb when possible. Next, let's see what effect night has on the attack.

This test showed very slightly worse performance in terms of miss distance than the low-level day attack (hit percentage was higher, but the only "miss" in the day test was a bomb that malfunctioned). But it's not really that surprising that a fully kitted-out Super Hornet, with ATFLIR and ASG-34 IRST can deliver weapons nearly as effectively in the dark. Let's see how well that holds up to going to medium altitude.

The medium altitude results are quite similar to the daytime ones in terms of average miss distance and total bombs required. Hit percentage was substantially higher, although I think this is probably not the best metric to evaluate these tests by. It counts any bomb which does any damage, so it's easy enough for a lot of bombs landing 250'+ out, which really aren't doing very much to the building, to count as hits.

But now that we have a modern baseline, it's time to start looking back. I'm going to start with one of the earliest multirole fighters in this database,¹ the F-4J Phantom II, largely because it can carry the same Mk 83 bombs that I've been using here. We'll start at low altitude.

Here, we see a significant falloff in ability to do damage. Most of the bombs are still getting close enough to do damage, but it's gone from 14 to 26 to wipe out all the buildings. I'm going to try taking this to altitude next, although there's an obvious problem waiting. The Phantom's bombload is only 3 bombs, and it took 38 for the Super Hornets to destroy all the buildings from medium altitude. I'm going to set each of the Phantoms up to fly twice, to ensure a reasonable number of bombs get used.

This was obviously a massively different result than the Hornets from medium altitude, and a good indication of why the arrival of PGMs was so revolutionary. At the same time, the Phantom was not exactly known for being one of the best bombing platforms of the day, so let's try a different plane, the 1975 version of the A-6 Intruder, again attacking from medium altitude.²

This was an interesting comparison to the Phantom. The average performance was significantly better, with a lot fewer genuine flyers landing 1000'+ from the target, but it wasn't all that much better at actually landing the sort of hits that counted. Yes, it got all buildings in 74 bombs instead of 8/10 in 72, but most of the "hits" were 200'+ away and didn't do all that much damage.

I ran a night test with the Phantoms, and the results were extremely similar to the day test, at least until I tried to send out the second wave and it wouldn't launch, because that bombing mission was day-only. I'm not sure how I got the first flight off, or how the game models night in general, but I think this post has run its course. I'll pick up the subject later.

Also, on an unrelated note, CMO has just rolled out multiplayer for the standard game, so if anyone is interested in contributing to future posts like this by letting me put humans on multiple sides, let me know. To be clear, this is less "let's see who is better" and more research like in this post. But I'm curious to see what I can do in cases where I'm less limited by my ability to script things.