By Geoff Fein
The Navy in 2008 will begin an effort looking at developing a direct attack moving target capability (DAMTC) for strike weapons as well as necking down the number of bomb racks the service has as well as moving away from energetics, to pneumatics, for bomb release, a Navy official said.
The Navy is about to begin a competition among Boeing [BA], Lockheed Martin [LMT], and Raytheon [RTN] to get the three companies to modify their current direct attack precision solutions to be able to accurately and consistently hit moving targets, Capt. Mat Winter, program manager, precision strike weapons, told Defense Daily in a recent interview.
“This DAMTC will have those three companies demonstrate their ability to hit moving targets by modifying, not developing something new, but taking what they already have in the inventory and for the most part just [putting] in some software and demonstrating the moving target capability,” he said.
Boeing makes the Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM), Lockheed Martin the Dual Mode laser guided bomb (LGB), and Raytheon the LGB.
The particulars of the competition are still being worked out, Winter said late last year. However, he added the competition will take place in mid-2008.
“We haven’t determined if it will be winner take all or multiple [awards]. We haven’t figured that out because what we are doing is modifying the current inventory. That current inventory keeps changing,” he said. “I have to have enough current inventory to sustain multiple vendors, so we are working that.”
But DAMTC will make its debut in FY ’09, he noted.
While dual mode gives the Navy a bomb that can track either by laser or GPS and hit fixed or moving targets, the DAMTC effort will provide flexibility to the current Navy arsenal without having to spend hundreds of millions of dollars, Winter said.
He expects to see the capability in the November ’08 time frame.
Another effort expected to begin this summer is to develop a Multi Purpose Bomb Rack, Winter added.
“The Multi Purpose Bomb Rack is a rack that will neck down all of our current dumb and smart racks we have in inventory to a single rack to reduce overall logistics and ownership cost,” he said. “We are ensuring that that rack is compatible to the internal bay carriage of [the Joint Strike Fighter].”
Right now across all of the Navy and Marine Corps platforms, there are somewhere between 37 and 47 unique racks, Winter said.
“Our effort for the Multi Purpose Bomb Rack is our first [attempt at] necking down a handful. There are some legacy aircraft that are going to have to keep those [other racks],” he said.
The Navy needs to make sure it not only has rack capability for training, but also for JDAM and Dual Mode LGB rack capability, Winter added.
“Right now we have four different racks that do that stuff. We are going to take those four and make them into one. We are conducting that competition [this] summer to start the development in FY ’09 for a Multi Purpose Bomb Rack,” he said.
Winter is also looking at an alternative to the tiny pyrotechnics used in bomb racks to release weapons. “We want to get rid of the energetics which has a life cycle tail of considerable amount, and go to a truly pneumatic concept.
“So not only are we trying to neck down smart and dumb bomb capability onto a single rack, but we are also incentivizing industry to show us solutions that eliminates CAD (Cartridge Actuated Device) energetics and goes to a pneumatic capability. We are excited to see what industry can do for us,” he added.
However, Winter sees the Navy sticking with CAD energetics until the true value of pneumatics comes to fruition.
Winter is the joint Department of Defense CADs and Propellant Actuated Devices (PADs) program manager. Besides the Navy and Marine Corps, he handles the systems used to eject aircraft seats for the Air Force, Coast Guard and homeland defense.