A new trend – flexible weapons

A new trend – flexible weapons

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13725809_sThe US Air Force’s inventory has a vast number of weapons systems developed and purchased through dozens of programs. Maintaining that disparate arsenal is costly, and in a time of budget cuts, increasingly important. According to Defense News the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) believes it has a solution in its flexible weapons program.

If you look at open literature on the weapons systems we have, and you put them together on a single piece of paper, you’ll see that a lot of the weapons look alike,” said Leo Rose, program manager for flexible weapons with AFRL. “They’ll have a tail end that may be different, or a front end which may be different, but for the most part the bomb kind of looks the same. And that’s a very inefficient way for the Air Force to do business, in my opinion.”

The key to Rose’s project is making sure technology can automatically sync up when added to the core of the weapon. He compares it to building a personal computer, where anyone can pull out a processor and install a brand new one in without a hitch.

One of the things we want to show is that you can develop an open architecture common interface such as component A and component B inside the weapon can be connected and self realize,” Rose said. “So if I have an EO/IR [electro-optical/infrared] seeker and I plug it into the weapon, then the control module says ‘Oh, you’re an EO/IR sensor, I’m going to function in this fashion.’ [Then later] I take that off and put an RF seeker in, and the control module says ‘you’re now an RF seeker, so I have to fly this way.’”

Flexible weapons could eliminate the technology gap that exists between when a weapon is developed and when it can be integrated onto a platform.

iHLS – Israel Homeland Security

We have made it so that our warfighter gets technology several years later than he should get it, and that’s wrong,” Rose said. “If we’ve done the risk reduction, if we’ve improved capability in some fashion, we should be able to put that in his bag of tricks today. So part of what flex weapons are going to try to do is look at how we can make technology refresh more economical.”

Cutting the number of weapons purchased and maintained should also result in lower USAF costs overall, and as an added benefit, Rose believes his program could have a “powerful” effect on industry.

Companies spend millions developing new weapons technologies, with the winner reaping the benefits and the losers looking at sunk costs. With flexible weapons, the service would not have to decide on a single winner.

If I had this open architecture already defined, then I don’t have to choose between company A and company B’s seeker. I can buy a mixture,” he said, allowing that second company to recoup some or all of its expenses.

The technology would certainly be popular outside the laboratory — if it can be proven to work.