The Marine Corps has gotten good at projecting forces over long distances in Afghanistan, a key ability as the military rebalances to the vast Pacific–but the service needs industry’s help in making sure it can bring along the proper strike capabilities, a service official said March 19 at the Precision Strike Annual Review.
Lt. Col. Michael Shand, who leads the unmanned aerial systems portfolio in Marine Corps headquarters aviation, said sending a V-22 a thousand miles inland from the sea is “actually pretty easy” but that if the aircraft finds a target, “we may not be able to kill it with the right-sized weapon with the responsiveness the raid force needs.” An F-35 typically wouldn’t be that far inland due to refueling and other logistical issues, and calling in a cruise missile could take 45 minutes and require approval all the way up the chain of command, he said. Though ground forces always suggest that the V-22 just bring mortar-sized rounds along on a mission in case, Shand said it’s not so simple–to be effective, the weapon should match the platform, the mission and the target without wasting a more expensive round than is needed.
What Shand ideally wants, he said, is a “FrankenMissile” system.
With general purpose bombs and rockets, “we can take that rocket motor, we can put a variety of different warheads on there and it’s modular, we can optimize those for different platforms” and missions, he said. “We want another version of that in the Marine Corps, we’re exploring how to get there. What warhead sizes are we looking at? Well, small stuff. Probably bigger than a hand grenade but optimized for blast frag, all the way up to something probably…like an 18-pound Javelin warhead because it can turn a main battle tank inside out.
“We want the ability to configure seeker heads, guidance kits, fuses, and propulsion–we don’t necessarily only want forward-firing , we want the ability for free-fall and glide weapons as well. We want to be able to build those at an ammunitions supply point and use them on multiple platforms,” he said.
Shand said having a collection of parts that all connect with common interfaces would let the Marine Air-Ground Task Force share parts in the field and assemble the correct combination as needed to be launched off a helicopter, fixed-wing plane, unmanned aerial vehicle or even a truck through a common launch tube.
Given the budget situation, the Marine Corps cannot afford its own new weapon system, let alone platform-specific weapons. But this system of connectable parts would allow other services to buy in too, as long as industry agreed on a common interface.
“We want it to be modular so we can go to multiple vendors and iterate technology very, very quickly,” Shand said, saying each new fuse or warhead ought to be added as an engineering change proposal to the system rather than as a new standalone acquisition program.
There may not be any opportunity in the immediate future to put Marine Corps dollars into the FrankenMissile idea, but Shand said in the out-years he could start the system by identifying an upcoming acquisition need for an existing platform and defining the weapons requirements in such a way that it has to comprise interchangeable weapons parts.
“What we would probably have to do is find a threshold platform, and find a requirement for an existing weapons system, and then as we define those requirements and budget for this–in competition with other things–we would have to define it in such a way that it’s modular and we can extend it to other platforms,” he said. “So specifically, being the UAV guy, I would look at options available for our program of record–which is really small, it’s a tiny little UAV–I would try to build a weapon, warhead, seeker head, guidance kit, et cetera, that I could also use on other platforms, and I would build out from there.”
If industry were to start working on the common interface now, Shand said, procurement would move much faster when the time comes and the technology could spread faster.