By Geoff Fein
As the Navy and industry develop new ship self defense systems to counter advances in anti-ship cruise missiles, it’s up to PMA-208 to find ways to represent the most sophisticated threats for developmental testing and training.
“You can think of silk banners being towed behind airplanes and people shooting at them. Believe it or not we still buy some silk banners for some very basic training, but that’s not really targets,” Capt. Pat Buckley, program manager, PMA-208, Aerial Targets and Decoy Systems, told Defense Daily in a recent interview.
“Targets are much more sophisticated than that. They are the key enablers to the development and fielding of every combat system we have envisioned or will envision,” he added.
Buckley said there is a notion that testing of ship systems can be done in modeling and simulation. “However, in the end, we need to get out there and test our systems against a threat representative material solution.”
“We couldn’t do it all in computers. We tried before and it gave us great data, but believe it or not what the model says will happen and what happens in reality is something totally different,” he added. “Our philosophy in DoD and [test and evaluation] is very stringent, especially if we are going to put a sailor or Marine in a vessel, in an airplane or operating equipment. You have to test that system end-to-end in its intended operational environment against any potential threat.”
That means targets are more than just a silk banner, Buckley added.
“We have to examine the most sophisticated threats that exist in the world today that our forces may face and we have to find a way to represent them in developmental and operational test and in some aspects even for training,” he said.
While PMA-208 is the aerial target office, Buckley noted they are also going into land targets.
“We are in the process of developing a high speed pick-up truck. If you look at the most current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, you have high speed SUVs, pick-up trucks, that have munition systems in the back,” he said.
PMA-208 is pursuing capabilities such as those brought by precision guided weapons’ ability to track, Buckley added.
But it is aerial targets that PMA-208 is known for. Buckley said there are three main family members of targets: full-scale, subsonic and supersonic.
In the full-scale range, the Navy has been pulling old Phantom F-4s out of the desert and converting them into unmanned targets. The QF-4 is used to simulate full-scale fighters, Buckley said.
The Air Force is leading an effort to take older retired F-16s and convert them to drones, he added.
“There will be a contract awarded…next year…that the Air Force will lead. That will go to industry to have someone drone old F-16s to become QF-16s,” Buckley said. “We will program these QF-4s and QF-16s to fly air-to-air engagement type profiles so we can test our air-to-air weapons systems and our ground-to-air weapon systems.”
In the subsonic family, the Navy has relied on the BQM-34 and the BQM-74. Those targets are used for developing systems to defeat anti-ship cruise missiles, Buckley said.
The Northrop Grumman [NOC]-built BQM-34, which resembles a little airplane, is out of production, he added. It was built to replicate, on a sub scale level, rudimentary flight characteristics. The BQM-34 has been used for more than three decades. “Today it really doesn’t meet that requirement in terms of fidelity.”
But the BQM-34 does have a big payload, so testers can do a lot of interesting avionics stuff on the inside, Buckley said. “But as an airframe, it is low fidelity in terms of representing the threat. There is no threat anti-ship cruise missile that looks like this.”
The BQM-74E, built by Northrop Grumman, looks more like a Tomahawk or Harpoon missile. “It truly represents many of today’s anti-ship cruise missile threats in the subsonic regime,” Buckley added.
The Navy just completed an analysis, begun in 2008, that indicated the BQM-34 is not truly threat representative of the most modern sophisticated subsonic anti-ship cruise missiles, Buckley said.
“We just awarded the last production contract. That was awarded in January ’09 for 160 targets,” he said.
That contract award to Northrop Grumman was for $49 million.
“We are embarking on an effort to replace it. We are going to replace it with a program right now we call SSAT–subsonic aerial target,” Buckley said.
The follow-on to the BQM-74E will be a competition, he added. “We anticipate releasing an RFP toward the end of this year for contract award in 2010.”
The Navy is looking to go to industry to select a rather mature vehicle that can have minor development done to it to meet the service’s needs, Buckley said. “We have done the market research. There are a number of potential candidate systems out there, and we anticipate a production award in 2012.”
On the supersonic side of the house, PMA-208 has some very impressive targets that it had to go out to industry to build, because the Navy didn’t have any weapon systems that matched the target, Buckley said.
Orbital Sciences [ORB] is building the GQM-163 Coyote, a supersonic sea-skimming target (SSST). It can reach speeds of Mach 2.6 while skimming just 15-feet above the water’s surface and is capable of making 10 G maneuvers, Buckley added.
“[That’s] 2,000 mph. In one second, it goes 10 football fields.. Every two seconds, it goes a mile, and it’s at 15-feet off the water. Talk about challenges,” he said.
The Navy had looked at buying the Russian KH-71 anti-ship cruise missile. It started off as a foreign comparative test back in the ’90s and then transitioned into a foreign military acquisition, Buckley noted.
“Our plan, with Russia’s acknowledgment, [was to take the] KH-17 anti-ship cruise missile and turn them into MA-31 targets. We figured the KH-17 represented, at the time, nearly [the] state-of-the-art supersonic [anti-ship cruise missile],” Buckley said. “So the MA-31 was going to be the SSST.”
Unfortunately, Boeing [BA] was unable to get the KH-17s in the quantities the Navy needed to convert to targets, he added. “So ultimately we went to Orbital Sciences who won the contract for the GQM-163. That is in production. [It’s a] state-of-the-art target.
“We flew the last MA-31 in December ’07. We did a joint exercise with the Army. We air-launched those. They were very effective…it was just hard to get the quantities we need of them,” Buckley said.
The other target in PMA-208’s inventory is one Buckley referred to as a subsonic-to-supersonic transition anti-ship cruise missile.
Last September, ATK [ATK] was awarded a $97 million contract for the design, development, integration, and test of the Multi-Stage Supersonic Target or MSST (Defense Daily, Sept. 3).
MSST will simulate a two-stage anti-ship cruise missile threat. It consists of a two-stage unmanned aerial target, a launcher, and associated support equipment. The Navy will use MSST to evaluate the operational effectiveness of weapons/combat systems against next-generation surface-to-surface anti-ship missiles that cruise at subsonic speeds, initiate a separation event, and then make a supersonic dash to the intended target, ATK said (Defense Daily, Sept. 3).
Upon separation from a subsonic to supersonic anti-ship cruise missile, MSST will accelerate to more than Mach 3, Buckley said.
“It’s very much a threat we don’t currently have the ability to test against,” he said. “We have done the modeling and simulation. We believe our weapon systems can handle this threat.”