US developing 'loitering', 'sleeping' weapons
AP New York, February 11
They loiter. They sleep. They hide. And when an enemy sticks his neck out, they kill.
The Department of Defence is preparing new weapons that can loiter over a battlefield or sneak into enemy territory and "sleep" until an appropriate military target blunders into their sights.
Some weapons envisioned are mere concepts and may never be produced. Others, like Lockheed Martin's 5-foot-long Loitering Attack Missile, are already being tested.
The idea, developers and contractors say, is that the best way to hit an elusive target is to hide a weapon inside enemy territory ahead of time.
In the Gulf War, US forces were unable to find and strike a single Iraqi mobile Scud missile launcher, a failure that has catalysed a slew of new military technology aimed at narrowing the time delay between spotting and destroying a target.
Loitering weapons are "the next big step in combat effectiveness," said Glenn Buchan, a RAND expert in unmanned aerial vehicles and satellites. "You hang around an area so you can see the target before it shoots, and kill it before it hides."
The Lockheed missile, for example, sprouts wings and fins and flies to a map coordinate, then can wander above the area for 45 minutes, directing a laser-radar seeker to search the ground for a target to destroy, said Steve Altman, development manager at Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control in Dallas
If a tank or mobile artillery battery were detected on a hillside, the LAM could be dispatched to search the whole hill until it found and destroyed it, Altman said. The LAMs are fired from a rectangular launch box that can sit on the back of an Army Humvee, Altman said.