By Michael Sirak
The Air Force is interested in launching a program early next decade to develop a 2,000-pound boosted penetrator munition as an enhanced means of defeating hardened and deeply buried targets, according to a senior service weapons developer.
“We are just completing a hard target study that has kind of shown that we need to go faster to go deeper,” John Corley, director of the Capabilities Integration Directorate within the Air Armament Center (AAC) at Eglin AFB, Fla., told Defense Daily during an interview last month. “So one of the concepts coming out of that is a boosted penetrator concept to increase the velocity.”
A briefing chart from Corley’s presentation at last month’s 33rd Air Armament Symposium in Ft. Walton Beach, Fla., shows that the Air Force is considering potential demonstrations of applicable technologies in FY ’10. This could lead to the insertion of the 2,000-pound boosted penetrator project in the service’s FY ’12 program objective memorandum, the chart states.
The new bunker buster would have “near 5,000-pound weapon class effectiveness,” Corley’s chart reads. Air Force officials at the munitions symposium said hardened and deeply buried targets are becoming more difficult to take out with the existing bunker-busting inventory.
There is no one silver bullet to defeat these vexing underground targets, such as command-and-control facilities protected by many feet of reinforced concrete and earth. Instead, the intent is to retain a suite of capabilities.
For example, the Air Force, together with the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), is pursuing the Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP), a huge, 30,000-pound bunker buster, built by Boeing [BA], that is envisioned to punch deep down to reach the underground and protected targets. The bomb is so large that only the B-2A and B-52H bomber aircraft are capable of carrying it.
The fate of the program is still in debate as part of Congress’ deliberations on FY ’08 defense legislation.
Corley said AAC already has notional plans for a follow-on to the current phase of MOP development.
“We have laid in a program, a follow-on to DTRA’s demonstration on the B-52,” he told Defense Daily. “We have been working with the B-2 [system program office] to integrate MOP onto the B-2.”
The notional planning calls for procuring 10 MOPs, with an option for 10 more, plus an additional five to support developmental testing on the B-2, Corley said.
“We are just waiting to see if funding is available and then we will be ready to execute the program, if the warfighter desires that,” he said.
The Air Force also intends to start development of a Hard Target Void Sensing Fuze (HTVSF) capable of sensing voids in multistory underground facilities and counting floors (Defense Daily, Oct. 19). It would be programmable so that it detonates at the correct moment, Air Force officials said at the symposium.
And Corley said AAC is working to improve insensitive munitions technologies so that bunker busters could be stored safely closer to the fight.
Defeating HDBTs is one of AAC’s three emerging focal points, along with weaponizing directed energy concepts and counter time-critical, fleeting objects via hypersonic missiles and mini munitions designed for carriage on unmanned aircraft.
One of the directed energy concepts that AAC intends to pursue is the High Power Microwave-Counter Electronics, Corley said (Defense Daily, Oct. 11 and Nov. 5).
“The concept is a glide weapon with a high-powered microwave source that could be a first engagement of an enemy that we want to send a message to, but we don’t want to go a kinetic route,” he said. With it, he continued, “we can show that we can reach out and touch him, shut down his comm[unications] system, his computer systems and also engage multiple targets with one weapon.”