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Amazing Improvised Smart Bombs
   Next Article → SPECIAL OPERATIONS: Another Red Squad
September 5, 2007: Here's a case of smart bombs with a clever, and unexpected,  twist. The Lebanese air force created an improvised helicopter bombing system for their recent operations against several hundred Islamic terrorists who had barricaded themselves in a northern town (technically a Palestinian refugee camp). Needing some precision bombing, so as not to hurt nearby civilians (who refused to be evacuated), bomb racks from retired Mirage 3 jets were mounted on the underside of American UH-1 helicopters. The landing skids were lengthened a bit for this. The bomb release mechanism from the Mirage 3 was then installed in the helicopters. Instead of smart bombs, the helicopter crews carried 500 and 900 pound dumb bombs, but flew them to GPS coordinates of their targets then, at an altitude of about 3,500 feet, and released the bombs. The accuracy was amazing, usually the same as GPS guided smart bombs (within 33 feet of the GPS coordinates). Troops on the ground, or the helicopter crew, could use laser rangefinders equipped with GPS (a commercially available product) to get the coordinates of the target. Then, using the GPS in the helicopter, you fly the chopper until you are right over those coordinates.

 

Apparently no one ever realized that, combining GPS, and a hovering helicopter with bomb racks, you can get about the same accuracy as a JDAM. Of course, one other factor was keeping down the ground fire. The army troops surrounding the terrorists could open fire as the helicopter approached, to make the bad guys keep their heads down. Bombing attacks could also be made at night, to make it more difficult for machine-gun fire to hit the choppers.  At 3,500 feet, a UH-1 is a pretty small target. And at night, very difficult to hit from the ground.

 

It's another case of. "desperation is the mother of invention."

 Next Article → SPECIAL OPERATIONS: Another Red Squad
  

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FJV       9/5/2007 12:32:20 PM
That's quite a smart move. If you get similar results to GPS guidance, then this could be something for the US, it would save the money of the guidance system. (more bang for your buck).

This shows that in preparation for a battle you can never count on your enemy being weak, stupid or inefficient. Should an enemy turn out to be weak, stupid or inefficient then that's a bonus, but you can never count on it.
 
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MadMilitaryMind    An interesting Idea   9/8/2007 1:42:59 AM
how about using this Idea with an old skycrane it could hold a sizeable amount of Bombs.
 
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sjdoc    Really gonna piss off the Air Force   9/8/2007 7:14:16 AM
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None of you guys get this yet, do you?
 
Say goodbye to the Key West Agreement.  Until this came about (and the guys at Ft. Rucker sure as hell know about it), the Air Force had a monopoly on the Army's ability to call for GPS-guided weapons delivery.  The Marines have always had their own and the Navy's weapons platforms, but the USAF always had control of the Doughboys' ability to call down precision bombs.
 
Now....
 
I don't think that the wing-wipers even want to think about what's going on behind those closed doors at the Aviation Technical Test Center (ATTC) alongside Cairns Field.
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displacedjim       9/8/2007 4:56:03 PM
As if USAF doesn't want the Army to be able to hover over a target and drop a bomb on it.  As if the Army would even bother to acquire the ability to hover over a target and drop a bomb on it.  Grow up.
 
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Rasputin       9/8/2007 6:49:49 PM

As if USAF doesn't want the Army to be able to hover over a target and drop a bomb on it.  As if the Army would even bother to acquire the ability to hover over a target and drop a bomb on it.  Grow up.

I  believed the Army had that ability before. They used to drop a smaller version of daisy cutters from their choppers to clear landing zones in Vietnam.

Won't be too difficult for them to try again, hell even rambo did it, but an aircraft bomb??
 
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sjdoc    Delivering PGMs from 3,500 feet...   9/9/2007 8:27:55 PM
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...is a damnsight different from kicking a glorified satchel charge out the door just above the treetops. 
 
If this GPS improvisation can be reliably used to turn the Army's helicopters into weapons platforms capable of dropping the equivalent of a JDAM from these aircraft while flying at high altitudes (instead of coming down close to the deck where the enemy can effectively engage them), then there's much less reason for the Army brigade commander to call in the Viper jockeys. 
 
He's got his own combat aviation assets "organic" to his command, and he'll use them preferentially.
 
 
 
 
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Nichevo       9/9/2007 8:32:45 PM
I suppose it would be ignoble to point out how much money would be saved?  Or, to look at it another way, how many more bangs you could get for the buck? 
 
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Nichevo       9/9/2007 8:37:00 PM
Duh, FJV.  Yez, I kin reed.

As for you, DJ, I guess everybody who repeats this may just be misinformed, or asses or whatever, but in most service industries, when the customer so often either complains or seeks alternatives to your services, denial is not the answer. 

If this is a problem that used to exist and no longer does to the whole jointness thing, some effort should be made to portray this.  But no amount of jointness, I think, will ever end interservice rivalry to the extent that funding is an issue.
 
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displacedjim       9/9/2007 10:59:44 PM

As for you, DJ, I guess everybody who repeats this may just be misinformed, or asses or whatever, but in most service industries, when the customer so often either complains or seeks alternatives to your services, denial is not the answer. 


My beef with people making claims about Army's dissatisfaction with USAF's air support is that I'd love to see the evidence that the Army is complaining about the air support provided by USAF or that the Army is seeking alternatives to air support (not supplements or improved versions of their own fires, but actual replacements for air support).  I don't read Army journals, but if there actually was dissatisfaction I'd expect Army officers to be publishing papers about it.  If this dissatisfaction exists, TRADOC or whatever organizations in the Army that develop new doctrine and TTPs or whatever should be ennumerating the problems and advocating alternatives.  Maybe if some readers are Army or read Army pubs and they know of some examples, they could mention them--guys like Shek or DA or probably a bunch of other posters.
 
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sjdoc       9/11/2007 9:48:43 AM
Says displacedjim:
 
" My beef with people making claims about Army's dissatisfaction with USAF's air support is that I'd love to see the evidence that the Army is complaining about the air support provided by USAF or that the Army is seeking alternatives to air support (not supplements or improved versions of their own fires, but actual replacements for air support)."
 
Okay.  See today's StrategyPage article on the Army's use of the MQ-5 series (Hunter) UAV armed with the Viper Strike PGM (at http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htairfo/articles/20070911.aspx ).
 
In that article, you'll find the following:
 
"For over half a century, the army and air force have abided by the 'Treaty of Key West,' an agreement president Eisenhower forced them to hammer out. The terms give the air force a monopoly on fixed wing warplanes, and allows the army to only operate small, two engine, fixed wing transports. However, the army can have all the helicopters it can get. UAVs were not covered in the Key West agreement, although UAVs existed in the 1950s. But armed UAVs were still only a distant possibility back then. Now the air force wants to extend its fixed wing monopoly to include armed UAVs. The army does not agree, and there's much pressure in the Pentagon to revise the Key West treaty, and not allow the air force to assume control over all the larger (over a hundred pounds) UAVs."  
 
Whether discussion of this issue appears in Air Force publications or not, the Army chafes under the restrictions of Key West, and would like to explore the same kinds of tactical benefits that these new technologies are providing the USMC and the Israeli Defense Forces.
 
Of course, to discuss these ideas in official promulgations - such as are associated with the Army's C&GS College, or in Parameters - would make the Air Force howl like sodomized baboons (as they did in the '50s and '60s, when the Army started arming helicopers and adopted the OV-1 [which was intrinsically capable of ground attack as well as reconnaissance, and was used in that role in Vietnam on a "don't ask, don't tell" basis]), so grabbing "authoritative" citations from such sources is effectively impossible. 
 
Army Aviation's desire to chuck the Key West agreement out the window has to be flown "under the radar."
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