The new American approach to Afghanistan has curtailed airstrikes using 500-pound bombs, and alternative weapons have been slow in coming. But if the U.S. military-industrial complex can get its act together, there's a a new generation of munitions, smaller and smarter than existing breed, that have the potential to make a major difference in counterinsurgency fights.
The video above shows a test launch of Scorpion, a thirty-five pound laser-guided glide bomb developed by Lockheed Martin and a rival to the GBU-44 Viper Strike, which is already in service. In this test, several munitions are released in quick succession from a high-speed sled.
The Scorpion has wings which unfold after launch. The makers say that this can give it a range of at least ten miles, although this is dependent on the launch conditions. A faster, higher-altitude launch will give greater range than a slow drop from low altitude, as Scorpion itself is unpowered and glides to the target. The initial design uses laser guidance, but potential upgrades include a millimeter-wave radar seeker and an imaging infra-red sensor under development.
Scorpion can be fitted to the same launch rails as the Hellfire missile employed by the Predator drone. But three much-smaller Scorpions can be fitted in place of one Hellfire, potentially tripling the number of shots available to a drone or helicopter.
However, as the video indicates, rather than being fired from a rail a number of Scorpions can be carried inside an aerodynamic pod carried by a high-speed platform. As Danger Room revealed earlier this year, Air Force Special Operations Command is rushing a new type of weapon into service known as Gunslinger. This is a system that mounts ten Viper Strike weapons and will be fitted to on MC-130W Combat Spear aircraft, turning them into low-cost gunships.
An even bigger effort is now under way by the name of Harvest Hawk which will convert the Marine Corps fleet of KC-130-J tanker aircraft into gunships, armed with a 30mm cannon and M299 racks carrying four Hellfires each. A later uprgade to the Harvest Hawk aircraft will add of either Viper Strike or Raytheon's Griffin missiles – another small weapon capable of replacing Hellfires at the ratio of three to one. There is clearly a demand for numbers of small, agile weapons capable of striking precision targets.
But while Viper Strike has a two-pound warhead, Scorpion packs a much heavier heavy punch, in the form of the Battleaxe warhead, which is described as "roughly 20-pound[s]." Very little has been released on Battleaxe over the past few years, but from the outset it was designed with multiple target types in mind. Normally, you have to make a choice between a shaped-charge armor-piercing weapon, a blast-fragmentation warhead suitable for vehicles and personnel, or a thermobaric warhead to demolish buildings. There are currently three different versions of Hellfire for these roles.
Battleaxe combines shaped-charge, fragmentation and enhanced blast in one compact package, and adds an extra bonus: it throws out fragments of reactive material which explode on impact, making it especially effective against unarmored vehicles and other soft targets. This type of explosive technology can make smaller munitions as effective as their bigger predecessors.
Lockheed Martin has not found a taker for Scorpion yet, as far as we know. Like Viper Strike and Griffin, it seems well-suited for the current struggle in Afghanistan, where drones and gunships do much of the work. Smaller munitions are the future, and companies are scrambling to keep up: this week even saw Raytheon adapting the AIM-9X Sidewinder missile to attack surface targets.
Video: Lockheed Martin
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