By Michael Sirak
The Air Force is realizing from recent combat that there is a need to re-examine how it designs some of its air-to-ground weapons, according to senior service munitions developers.
There has been ample discussion resulting from the experiences of applying airpower against insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq on the need for bombs and missiles capable of striking elusive targets on the move or seeking refuge in crowded urban areas.
But these activities have also highlighted the need for new approaches in weapons design that may appear more mundane at first mention, such as the amount of hours a weapon can withstand the rigors of flight on its host aircraft before it is employed. This is known as the captive-carry requirement.
“We have historically built our air-to-ground weapons for a perspective of: load them up, take them out, fly the mission, fly them to the target, drop the ordnance and return home,” Bruce Simpson, director of the Air Armament Center’s 308th Armament Systems Wing, said at last month’s 33rd Air Armament Symposium in Ft. Walton Beach, Fla.
However, the Air Force’s tactics in the current fight of keeping aircraft in the air for extended periods and ready to respond quickly to calls for support from ground forces– but sometimes not expending their weapons before returning to base–have altered that approach with implications on the munitions. “I think that is a major lesson learned,” Simpson said.
A case in point is the new GBU-39/B Small Diameter Bomb Increment I (SDB I) system, a 250-pound-class, all-weather, GPS-guidance-aided weapon supplied by Boeing [BA]. The weapon made its combat debut late last year and is currently carried by F-15E multirole fighter jets (Defense Daily, Dec. 1, 2006).
“Due to the kind of war we are flying, it has flown captive carry a lot more before it is expended,” Judy Stokley, deputy program executive officer for Weapons, told Defense Daily during an interview.
For example, Simpson said, some of the SDBs sent to the Middle East/Near East theater in October 2006 had already reached their captive-carry design life by mid December 2006.
“When you hang [SDBs] on an F-15 in Afghanistan and they fly a 10-hour mission, they collect a lot of hours very quickly,” he said.
As a result, the Air Force, working with Boeing, instituted changes under a quick-reaction program to double the captive-carry life of the bomb, Simpson said, noting that a second round of extension still lies ahead.
“We are working to double that again to get us the captive-carry life…we need for the way that we are flying and fighting today,” he said.
The Air Force plans to procure more than 24,000 SDB I weapons, with deliveries lasting beyond 2015.
The SDB I moved into full-rate production in December 2006 and, as of late September of this year, the service said it had about 700 in its inventory, having already expended about 50 of them in Afghanistan and Iraq (Defense Daily, Sept. 28).
The Air Force has said the bomb’s performance is meeting all requirements.
Earlier this week Boeing won the contract for lot 4 production of 2,082 additional GBU-39s (Defense Daily, Oct. 31).