US Marines developing air-launched swarming munitions for helicopters

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Marine Corps intends to exchange some decades-old Hellfire missiles with a family of long-range loitering munitions, giving its attack helicopters greater range and lethality for a fight within the Pacific region.

This move comes as a part of the Corps’ ongoing Force Design 2030 modernization effort to arrange the service to discourage or win a fight against China and other potential adversaries.

The Marine Corps on Monday released an annual status update on Force Design efforts, which included a nod to the service’s Long-Range Attack Munition effort supported by the undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, “to rapidly develop and field a low-cost, air launched family of loitering, swarming munitions.”

In a June 2 call with reporters, Brig. Gen. Stephen Lightfoot, director of the Capabilities Development Directorate, noted that as an AH-1 pilot, he has firsthand experience with the Hellfire missile. Depending on the helicopter’s altitude, a pilot might get 8 kilometers (5 miles) of range from the weapon.

“That’s great in [Operation Iraqi Freedom], [Operation Enduring Freedom] and areas we’ve been fighting in for years. But while you move over to the Indo-Pacific and among the distances we’re talking about, 8 kilometers doesn’t really do as much as you’d want,” Lightfoot said.

Noting that the last H-1 attack helicopters were delivered last 12 months and that the Corps will operate them for several more a long time, he said the service must now pursue each evolutionary and revolutionary ideas to keeping these aircraft relevant to the fight.

The service is already experimenting with these long-range, loitering, swarming munitions and expects to field them “inside the following few years,” Lightfoot noted.

“That could be a capability that brings lots of of kilometers, and that permits us to have the ability to make use of a current platform to have the ability to do things that we never thought we’d have the ability to do,” Lightfoot said, calling this development effort “critical.”

These munitions would even be operable from ground launchers, he added.

While the helicopters’ own range and maneuverability would enhance the munitions’ capability, Lightfoot said, aircraft aren’t at all times within the air. To make sure Marines operating forward have round the clock access to long-range offensive weapons, he said the service would pursue a launcher to be used by ground troops.

In a separate interview on the Force Design update, Scott Lacy, the deputy director of the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory, said the organization is working on this effort with the aviation community. The work includes studying munitions already in the marketplace in addition to other experimental capabilities.

The Force Design annual update noted “other projects include developing a standard launcher for the family of ground launched loitering munitions and testing a low-cost, hypersonic booster in a form factor the Marine Corps can logistically support in a contested environment.”

Lacy didn’t elaborate much on the hypersonic booster, aside from to say experimentation is ongoing on the lab.

In the identical interview, Col. Daniel Wittnam, the director of the Marine Corps Integration Division, described one other long-range offensive fires effort by which the service is involved, along with the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

The office provided money for the Corps to experiment using the Maritime Strike Tomahawk — a derivative of the legacy Tomahawk land-attack missile that the office directed in fiscal 2017 — as a land-based weapon.

Marines will use the Naval Strike Missile as their first ground-based, anti-ship missile but have previously said they intend to pursue other longer-range weapons for the long run.

Wittnam said the eleventh Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division at Camp Pendleton, California, was standing up a battery to work with the Maritime Strike Tomahawk.

The query the Marines have as they consider this and other emerging capabilities is whether or not the technology is naval and expeditionary, given their concentrate on littoral operations within the Pacific, the colonel said.

He noted the present form factor isn’t, but he said the experimentation would proceed. (The proof-of-concept system would mount the missile launcher on a Joint Light Tactical Vehicle chassis, a setup that already had a tip-over incident because of the middle of gravity being off.)

Lt. Gen. Karsten Heckl, the deputy commandant for combat development and integration, told reporters in the course of the June 2 roundtable that not all the continued experiments can be successesful, however the Corps would learn from all of them because it rapidly modernizes.

“I don’t have the luxurious of, (A) test something, (B) get the feedback, (C) let’s make changes. , that takes years and years. We have now to iterate and, if obligatory, fail quickly and learn faster, after which iterate again,” he said.

In doing so, Heckl added, “we’ve got made the fleet more capable. Period. Full stop.”