JULY/AUGUST AIRFORCEMAG.COM AFRL’s New Goal: Bombs Smart
Enough to Coordinate Attacks
DAYTON, Ohio—
e Air Force is abandoning its “Gray Wolf ” swarming
cruise missile development program to instead fund “Gold-
en Horde,” which would equip bombs with the smarts to
cooperate in combat.
Brig. Gen. Anthony W. Genatempo, Air Force program
executive o cer for weapons, said in a June 20 interview that
rather than develop another cruise missile, Golden Horde
would enable the Small Diameter Bombs I and II, the Joint Air-
to-Surface Stando Missile, and the Miniature Air-Launched
Decoy to act in concert with one another after launch.
“If we drop a number of the same genus, let’s say all SDBs
... can the four of them act collaboratively together on an
engagement?” Genatempo said.
Incorporating such decision-making technology into weap-By Rachel S. Cohen
ons without requiring human input is of growing interest to
Pentagon planners, and is especially valuable in contested
environments where human-machine communications might
be spotty or severed.
Genatempo related the program to ongoing discussions
with the Navy about its “Motley Crew”
program, which Military.com described
in 2017 as “a group of unmanned aerial
systems that can share information and
then assign tasks and make strategic
targeting decisions based on available
intelligence.” at e ort is progressing
under a consortium of companies in-
cluding Raytheon, Northrop Grumman,
and Lockheed Martin, plus military lab-
oratory representatives.
In December 2017, AFRL provided
Lockheed and Northrop with $110 million
contracts to prototype and demonstrate Gray Wolf low-cost,
subsonic cruise missiles designed to defeat enemy air de-
fenses. Five other bidders competed. Prototyping would have
explored how the “plug-and-play” weapons could carry ki-
netic warheads, electronic-attack payloads, and intelligence,
surveillance, and reconnaissance sensors, according to AFRL.
Now the Air Force plans to nish the rst phase of the three-
phase program in June or July, then scrap the remaining two
stages in favor of Golden Horde, which it plans to demonstrate
for the rst time in about a year.
In March, California-based Scienti c Applications Re-
search Associates netted $100 million to demonstrate Golden
Horde’s “emerging munition technologies” after outbidding
other companies, according to a Defense Department con-
tract announcement.
“ e e ort is conceptualized as a fast-paced Air Force
Research Laboratory-led demonstration project executed
under the auspices of the Team Eglin Weapon Consortium,”
according to DOD. “Work will be performed in Cypress, Calif.,
and is expected to be complete by December 2021.”
“What our warfighter is really interested in is, if I have
a very large weapons truck like an F-15 or like one of our
bombers that can drop multiple of these munitions, is
there a way to act in such a way to provide better effects on
targets? Or better [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnais-
sance] back to a command and control node?” Genatempo
said. “We are still unraveling the onion on what that may
actually mean as far as operational capability goes.”
Think about last year’s US air strikes on Syria, including
the first combat use of Lockheed Martin’s JASSM, he said.
That mission succeeded thanks to extensive planning:
Each Tomahawk and JASSM was dropped at a specific
time, followed a predetermined flight path, and struck a
particular target.
But what if the weapons could think through those steps on
their own and send feedback to other munitions and airmen?
If they could say, “ e rst two of us that got here four
minutes earlier, we actually took out this target,” Genatempo
said, then they could decide “the two of you that were coming
in behind us ... you can go to Target B.”
Within that four-minute ight time, he said, “there would
be time to adjust to go to Target B.”
AFRL, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency,
and weapons manufacturers are collaborating to create such
a network.
“ at’s to come,” Genatempo said. JBrig. Gen. Anthony
GenatempoPhoto: USAFin ways that require di erent approaches to overcoming
these constraints.”
In a peer ght, one base holding 100 aircraft would be
too vulnerable. Such challenges call for smaller footprints,
with manpower and aircraft spread more thinly around the
world. at, in turn, would stress parts supplies that could
require delivering parts to destinations in contested areas.
Cannibalizing other aircraft for spares won’t necessarily be
an option if fewer aircraft are available in a given location,
Holmes stated.
“Every part we can avoid having to ship, everything we
cannot think about because we’re more reliable will be even
more important,” he continued. “We’ll be dispersed, with only
a minimum number of maintainers, often multiskilling the
maintainers we have to do more than one job. ... Our units
will have to operate more independently with what they’ve
got in hand.”
He implored industry to work with the government to
boost the reliability of components and subcomponents so
that parts fail less often and, so the Air Force can be better
prepared when they do. For its part, the service will contin-
ue shifting money into aircraft availability initiatives and
exploring modern sustainment ideas, such as 3-D printing
parts and developing predictive maintenance algorithms.
e Air Force needs to plan for those upkeep needs earlier
in the development and procurement cycle, noted Holmes.
ACC is also rallying to the idea that developmental test-
ing and operational testing could be merged. Driven by the
success of the “Kessel Run” coding team in Massachusetts,
where code is pushed out and improved in iterative “sprints”
and requirements develop as projects mature, o cials see
the potential for faster, smoother, and more continuous
improvement.
“We have built some combined test forces where we have
OT and DT together on the same team,” Holmes said. “We’re
looking at some organizational changes on what might be
the next step.”
Holmes said he would meet with Air Force Materiel Com-
mand boss Gen. Arnold W. Bunch Jr. this year to re ne a path
forward and hopes to work the new testing mindset into the
2021 budget. J