The New Air Force Gunship

By John

Requirements for the Air Combat Command’s (ACC’s) bomber and the gunship are still being drawn up. But, both commands agree on some key characteristics: a degree of low observability (LO)—not necessarily full stealth—and endurance. The future gunship will look nothing like today’s lumbering platform, and it could actually wind up appearing more like a B-2. “I don’t think the transport next-generation gunship will be on a mobility platform because you are not going to need to carry around all that weight,” says Lt. Gen. Michael Wooley, outgoing Afsoc commander. “If you are not carrying around that big gun and all of that heavy ammunition you don’t need a big [transport] that is in itself vulnerable.” Wooley will be replaced by his current vice commander, Maj. Gen. Donald Wurster, later this year.

ACC has announced it will not push the state-of-the-art for its next-generation bomber, which must be fielded beginning in 2018. That time frame and limited funding are prompting the Air Force to scale back earlier aspirations for a highly stealthy platform equipped with exotic directed-energy weapons. Afsoc has traditionally latched onto the Air Force’s larger buys when procuring a platform in order to prevent having to dedicate funding to a separate development project.

Sounds cool. Maybe we'll build more than eight of them this time around.

July 23, 2007 07:40 AM Air Assault ~ Tech

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Comments

Maybe it's just 'cuz, like most muddy-boots grunts, I always had a fantasy of calling for fire support and having Spectre show up, (I knew a guy who claimed he made a call for fire during Tet, and got the New Jersey!) but...
This disturbs me, a bit. Maybe the reporter didn't understand what was being said, but the description of "What they want" doesn't seem to me to match the reality of what they were describing they needed.
Shouldn't a gunship BE a slow mover, by definition? The comments section of the WIRED article makes mention of the AC130s loiter time over target--would a fast mover have that?
And the Aviation Week & Space Technology article talks about "retractable tube weapons", not "directed energy" (i.e., lasers) which would still call for a fairly large fuselage, not to mention the fact that directed energy weapons are still very much in the "Can we make this work reliably?" stage. (Boeing is working on it. And can you imagine the articles in New Rebublic when we start using Death Rays to kill innocents?)

D.W. Drang · July 23, 2007 10:43 AM

I'm sorry, but did I misread that? I thought that general said, "... since we won't be carrying around that big gun and all that ammunition..."

So, what exactly WILL it carry? And, if it don't carry GUNS, then why call it a GUNship?

With this logic, are you sure the Army isn't having a hand in all this?

Joel · July 23, 2007 12:00 PM

The thing will have friggin' lasers.

Hope it's enough to zap a Decepticon, like the old and reliable platform.

cardoso · July 23, 2007 01:16 PM

Lasers? Who ordered this thing? Doctor Evil?

Lasers are neat... don't get me wrong. But several thousand rounds of 7.62mm, mixed in with 40mm Bofors, and a 105mm round to spice things up in a football field-size swath of AO just seems, to me, a tad more impressive.

Joel · July 23, 2007 01:22 PM

If Dr. Evil ordered these, they'd have "frickin' LASERs". Because, as you know, even Air Force officers deserve a warm meal...

or, uh, something like that.

I think they're going in the wrong direction here.. I would be looking for something "simple, deadly, numerous and cheap". High tech is all well and good, but it's not like anyone is flush wish cash right now. The F-22 is already soaking up most of the Air Force procurement budget, as I understand it.

Nicholas · July 24, 2007 03:29 PM