“Putting an engine inside [JSOW]
without changing the outer mold
line of a proven truck is a great next
spiral capability to a proven weapon
system,” Winter said. “I am extremely excited about the demonstration.”
The dominance of precision-guided weapons has virtually
eclipsed the use of “dumb” bombs
by carrier air wings over Afghanistan and Iraq, Burt said, though
some unguided rockets are being
used. Precision weapons lower the
risk of collateral damage, which also
is being reduced by the use of smaller bombs.
“We’re carrying small weapons;
500-pounders are probably the
biggest you’ll see them carrying
into combat today,” Burt said.
One new small aerial weapon is in the source-selection
process. The Small-Diameter Bomb II (SDB II), a joint Air
Force-Navy program, will first be fielded on the Air Force
F-15E, but will not appear on Navy and Marine Corps
strike fighters until the F- 35 Lightning II enters service.
Burt said one nonprecision method still popular is old-fashioned strafing with cannon fire and has been used frequently by strike fighters in Afghanistan, in which airmen
operate in a very low-threat air-defense environment.
“It has surprised a lot of people,” he said. “If you’re
trying to suppress some fire in a tree line but you don’t
want to blow up the farmer’s orchard or his field or the
next village — when dropping 500-pound bombs are
going to blow out windows and do lots of collateral
damage — strafing makes perfect sense.
“If you’ve got a clear lane of fire, you can suppress
whatever is going on. Sometimes, that’s all the guys on
the ground need.”
The Navy and Marine Corps F/A- 18 strike fighters
use targeting pods such as the Raytheon Advanced
Tactical Forward-Looking Infrared and the Northrop
Grumman Litening to track a target and, using a data
link, transmit the images to a Remotely Operated
Video Enhanced Receiver III laptop computer operat-
ed by a joint terminal air controller embedded among
ground forces. The controller can mark the target on
the image and guide the aircraft in for the attack.
“There’s always the desire to make it as automated
as you can, so, for our future [close air support (CAS)]
systems, we’d like to go to a digital CAS system in our
aircraft,” Burt said, noting that in the low-threat air-defense environment over Afghanistan, strike fighters
are able to orbit overhead and be guided to a target by
two-way voice radio chatter.
U.S. NAVY
Weapons department Sailors steady a Joint Standoff Weapon (JSOW) as a skid
is placed below during ordnance handling training aboard the aircraft carrier
USS Harry S. Truman in 2007. Upcoming tests will mark another step forward
for the Navy in using networked weapons, such as the JSOW, for precision
strike against moving targets.
For example, Burt said, the controller might say to
the aircraft, “‘Do you see the road? Do you see the bend
in the road, the two trees? Go 100 meters south. Do
you see the ditch? OK, your target is to the left of the
ditch. Tell me when you’ve got contact.’
“If we could digitize that, though, that makes it a lot
easier,” he said. “[The controller] has a GPS, lasers,
systems that can look at a target and have very precise
coordinates on that target and he can zap that up to us
in the cockpit.”
Burt said that in addition to network integration of
weapons, the Navy is working to make sure those net-
works are secure from jamming or intrusion. Other
efforts include research in propulsion to increase the
range and speed of a weapon without increasing its
size, which becomes even more of an issue in fitting
weapons within the finite size of the weapons bay of an
F- 35, in order to preserve its stealthy profile.
Another effort is focused on designing warheads to
explode in a desired direction rather than in all directions.
“If we can shape the way it explodes, we can then
shrink that warhead, make it more effective and increase
capacity in the weapon body itself for better guidance or
more fuel,” Burt said. “We’re trying to integrate the fuse
into the seeker, for instance. If we can come up with a
combination seeker head and fusing sensor, then, again,
[we] can free up space in the weapons for other things.”
Burt added that the high priority of reducing collateral damage extends to residual ordnance. The Navy, in
accordance with international agreements, is phasing
cluster bombs out of its inventory because of the risks
residual unexploded bomblets pose to civilian populations. The JSOW-A is one such weapon that will be
phased out by 2018. ■
