buffnut453
Captain
reductio ad absurdum (maybe)
Assume you are using guided bombs. You wage a campaign using these weapons. During the campaign you drop 100 bombs. All 100 land within 10 ft of the aiming point (assume close enough to have done significant damage to anything at the aiming point).
After the campaign you find that only 50 of the aiming points were at the correct target. When you do your post-campaign analysis of CEP, what do you learn from using the 50 bombs that hit the correct aiming point, and what do you learn from the 50 that hit an incorrect aiming point 10 miles from the target.
If useful for the problem we are discussing we can change the numbers that hit the wrong aiming point to only 40, with the remaining 10 being dropped over open ocean (500 miles away - say we are in the PTO) due to engine failure aborts.
Or make it 9 out of the 10 are dropped over open ocean due to engine failure aborts, and 1 destroyed when the bomber crashes at the end of the runway on TO.
What is your CEP?
What do the CEP results tell you?
Does it make any sense when evaluating other phenomena in the campaign?
If a weapon is jettisoned because of system failure (engine, fuel, hydraulics etc) then it is not counted as being dropped/launched at the intended target. Same-same for a weather abort with the bombs being jettisoned over a "safe", designated area of the sea. Such circumstances are always classified as mission aborts and are not considered in the CEP. IMHO, a formation that attacks the right target but misses isn't in the same class of mission failure.
In your first example, if the pilot selects the wrong aim point then he/she isn't attacking the right target. The aim point (in modern parlance the Joint Desired Point of Impact) is defined by the targeting process and not randomly selected by the crew mid-mission. If the pilot is tasked on a particular target but misses entirely because of navigational errors, then the weapon missed the desired and tasked target. Period.
The example we're talking about is when a formation attacks the right target but less than 5% of their bombs fall within 1000ft of the target. That's not 5 miles away or over the ocean. Discounting raids that meet this criteria seems really odd to me. Even if the formation attacks the right aim point, the sheer size of the combat box formation means that, at best, 40% of bombs would fall within 1000ft of the target. That's under perfect conditions with every bomber at the same altitude, all bombs falling evenly, and the lead bombardier releasing at the optimal instant. That percentage falls off drastically when we factor in different altitudes of aircraft within the formation, or if there are other errors (the formation is slightly off-track, the wind speed/direction is mis-calculated, or the lead bombardier pickles slightly early or late).
But we're not talking about these circumstances. We're talking about formations attacking the right targets but less than 5% of bombs falling within 1000ft of the aim point. No mention was made of weather or system malfunction. Excluding these missions/formations seems arbitrary to me, and smacks of excluding figures that we don't like in our analysis.
