Gen. Stanley McChrystal has taken over leadership of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan; he has a special operations background and has gone on the record saying that reducing civilian casualties is vital for success. He's about to issue a "tactical directive" giving clear instructions on what must be done to minimize civilian casualties -- and that may be one reason why Air Force Special Operations Command is scrambling to field a new type of weaponto carry out ultra-precision strikes from the air.
One option may be the Gunslinger system, which could be mounted on the MC-130W Combat Spear aircraft. It will be able to deliver a salvo of ten small, precision-guided glide bombs in rapid succession – before being reloaded in the air for further salvos.
The glide bomb here is the Special Operations Precision Guided Munition (SOPGM), a modified version of the Viper Strike weapon. Viper Strike is derived from the Brilliant Anti-Tank (BAT) weapon, originally conceived as a submunition that would be released by a missile from the Army's Multiple Launch Rocket System and home in on enemy tanks with a special directional acoustic sensor. BAT was canceled, but re-emerged with a new guidance system as Viper Strike.
The Viper Strike is an obvious weapon for Special Force's AC-130 Spectre gunships, and I wrote about a proposal to upgrade Spectres with racks of Viper Strikein 2006 . But, as the latest solicitation shows, the command is considering fitting Gunslinger on MC-130W Combat Spear aircraftinstead. The Combat Spear is best known for infiltration/exfiltration – getting Special Forces in and out of hot spots – as well as special refueling missions and dropping certain exotic ordnance, like the giant BLU-82 bomb, which they slide down a ramp at the back of the aircraft.
A pre-solicitation notice issued June 4 calls for a contractor to "design, produce, install and field" the first Gunslinger system on an MC-130W within 180 days. The Special Operations Command budget for this year indicates that the precision strike package will also include sensors, communications and other relevant gear, as well as a single, medium-caliber gun.
The original Viper Strike described in this presentationweighed 43 pounds with a 2.3 pound warhead; the warhead on a Hellfire is more like twenty pounds. It has a glide ratio of ten to one, so in theory it could hit a target ten miles away if it was dropped from five thousand feet. It has combined GPS and laser guidance, with extreme accuracy: the "circular error probable," a circle in which half the rounds will hit, is less than a meter. It can hit a vehicle moving at 25 mph "with some target maneuvering."
Enhancements planned in 2006 included a fragmentation belt to make it more effective against personnel and a datalink so several Viper Strikes could hit a target nearly simultaneously. The attack profile can be horizontal or vertical as needed; proponents say that combined with the small warhead this means collateral damage can be limited.
“We can drop this between a mosque and a busload of nuns, and not hurt either the mosque or the nuns,” Steve Borden, the Deputy Product Manager for Viper Strike, boasted to National Defense magazine."We can use it to fly through a window and take out a sniper, or hit a car in a convoy."
Viper Strike has already been used to arm drones in Iraq, including the MQ-5 Hunter which is too small to carry Hellfires, but little information has been released on this. The modifications that turn Viper Strike into SOPGM, include enhanced lethality (probably that fragmentation sleeve), the data-link, extended range mentioned above and possible a 'less lethal' mode which makes the warhead inert and turns it into a forty-pound flying sledgehammer --said to be able to destroy a vehicle engine without harming the passengers.
One Viper Strike will not be enough to take out a building; but putting a Viper Strike though every window known to have hostiles inside should have the required effect. And if it means that you can target a group of insurgent leaders meeting on the top floor without harming the women and children on the floor below. In future the two-pound warhead is likely to become the preferred weapon, and the two-thousand pound bombs used in Garaniwhere 25 civilians died may become as unacceptable as carpet bombing.
[PHOTO: U.S. Army]
See Also:
- Civilian Casualties Hit New Highs in Afghanistan
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