I had the chance to attend a Fires conference in which General Ridge posed the PGM question as "How much precision can we afford."
In that vein, GMLRS makes a lot of sense because one guided rocket has the same planning value as six standard rockets, as well as twice the (UNCLAS) range. When accuracy for the standard round is 10 mils a 1M CEP is a tremendous improvement.
There was the implication that we could save money on PGMs and apply that towards more gunnery instruction. When you are using AFATDS the degree of accuracy possible is significantly higher than with standard techniques. When you are using a system like the M777A2 that can receive Fire Commands to the nearest tenth mil your accuracy increases as well.
You still have to account for the five Requirements for Accurate and Predicted Fire, four of which fall squarely on the artillery unit. An Artillerist on another forum that I frequent mentioned that when he was shooting in OIF he shot "cold stick" which means he made no attempt to quantify some non-standard conditions. Specifically, he stated that he shot without accounting for the differences in propellant lot. When you have dozens of different lots of propellant on hand it may be difficult to use the proper one (on the sun section) and quantify the effect on MVV (on the FDC).
With a system like PGK, the round would automatically compensate for that error and impact where the guidance system directed.
Excalibur is a different deal. It offers the ability to hit and kill a single building, or even a room in a building, with an increase in range over standard 155MM rounds, a near vertical angle of fall, and a small warhead that limits collateral damage. It also requires certain charges and the Fire Commands must be digital. Thus it has some limitations. It is also the most expensive FA PGM.
As for what we can afford, we have JDAMs in service or in development that can do all these things, but once you factor in flight time they may not be any cheaper.
I would like to ask those more senior to me if it would ultimately be cheaper to use aircraft to generate targeting information and then fire the mission from a SPLL or HIMARS.
But then, I do have a professional bias.
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