Gunships are a special breed of aircraft. Ironically, they are valued most by those on the ground. When critical close air support is needed by special forces, the gunships fly into action. But the United States is running out of these valuable flying battleships.
America's milittary currently deploys a variety of special forces, that is, small, highly trained units that perform specialized, tense and tough missions. These include the Army's Rangers, the Marine Corp's Force Reconnaissance Companies, and the Navy SEALs, who have most recently been in the news for their anti-piracy work. Common to all of the missions undertaken by these units is the need for close air support. This might be delivered by an attack plane such as the A-10 Thunderbolt, the AV-8B Harrier, a helicopter gunship such as the AH-6 Little Bird or AH-64 Apache, or by one of two types of fixed wing gunships currently operated by the U.S. Air Force. These fixed wing gunships, seventeen 1990s era AC-130U Spooky and eight 1970s vintage AC-130H Specter class planes, are literally falling to pieces due to the mission tempo they're subjected to in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Various reports indicate that our gunships are seeing four times the action planned for the air frame's life cycle. Losses in modern conflicts due to enemy action are rare, with just a single plane going down during Desert Storm. More ominous was the 1994 loss of another plane due to an in-flight explosion of its 105mm main gun. This non-combat loss is a trend that is likely to escalate as these aircraft spend more and more time running low, fast, and heavily loaded. Particularly worrying are the centerline wing boxes that are already scheduled for replacement; failure of this part was the cause of the 2002 crash of a civilian C-130 water bomber, which lost both wings under a normal load in the midst of a water drop.
The seventy-ton, twenty thousand horsepower AC-130 has hosted every weapon from 7.62x51mm miniguns to testing involving 120mm breach loading mortars. The current norm is a 105mm howitzer and a 40mm World War II vintage Bofors autocannon on the AC-130H. The newer AC-130U expands upon this arsenal with the presence of a 25mm Gatling gun coupled with a massive 2,500 round magazine.
The Bofors 40mm, the premier medium anti-aircraft cannon of World War II, has found a long second career as a middle weight piece on our gunships, but its support difficulties are emblematic of the problems faced by the aircraft's maintainers. As the once ubiquitous Bofors has grown increasingly rare, the lead-time for spare parts has expanded dramatically. A broken firing pin can mean weeks of operating without this gun. The Air Force has attempted to correct this by replacing both the 40mm gun and the 25mm gun with a 30mm cannon using the same round and many sharing spare parts with the A-10 Thunderbolt's GAU-8 Gatling gun. While potent, this weapon proved to be inaccurate when using the mounting system meant for the older 40mm gun. Four of the AC-130Us received this modification for a period of time but they were quickly returned to their original configuration.
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The Air Force is already acquiring the Italian designed C-27J Spartan to replace its aging C-23 Sherpa transports. Boeing is angling to operate a Florida-based U.S. final assembly plant for this smaller twin-engine aircraft. The Air Force Special Operations Command has acquired one of these planes for testing with current weapons and control systems.
The envisioned replacement, christened the AC-27J Stinger II, takes its name from the Vietnam era twin engine AC-119K Stinger, a transport pressed into gunship duty after the C-130 inventory was overrun with requests for more close air support ships. The first airframe, purchased in the fall of 2008, is being tested with both the 30mm and 40mm cannons to determine which is best. The 30mm round has a somewhat smaller diameter but makes up for this deficit by being longer and carrying nearly the same projectile mass as the larger round. The improved propellant, smaller case volume, and use of aluminum rather than brass make the smaller round less than half the weight of the larger, and the 30mm are suitable for a fully automated drum fed magazine. The 40mm gun requires a pair of crewmen sharing the duty of inserting the archaic four round clips the gun uses.
Replacing the 105mm howitzer will be the GBU-44, a precision-guided glide bomb. While more complex and expensive than the 105mm round it packs the same punch, can deploy silently, causes no recoil related stress to the airframe, and with its glide ratio it can strike from over the horizon if the ground unit being supported has the appropriate laser designator to guide it.
Expanding upon the role of an attack craft, the Stinger II will also have some of the same infiltration/exfiltration capabilities of the MC-130 series of planes, with the ability to insert and remove squad-sized teams. Insertion occurs via parachute drop and recovery is done with the same sort of Fulton system used to rescue downed pilots during World War II. This theme of smaller, more numerous forces operating with more flexible systems is being driven into all corners of all four branches of our military.
A politically and operationally viable path forward would involve the retirement of the older AC-130H machines, the fielding of two to three dozen of the newer, smaller AC-27J gunships, then a refit of the AC-130U machines with a pair of 30mm guns and the glide bombs. The ongoing missions in Iraq and Afghanistan coupled with the need for proactive attention in Somalia and other emerging trouble spots demands we fill this need sooner rather than later.
Neal Rauhauser writes for The Cutting Edge News and is an analyst and consultant on energy and telecommunications. He is a member of the Stranded Wind Initiative and can be found at www.strandedwind.org.
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