Air Force Special Operations Command (Afsoc) is planning to buy a fleet of bombers to house its future gunship, breaking with a decades-old tradition of using C-130 transports to carry heavy fires into the sky.

Requirements for the Air Combat Command’s (ACC’s) bomber and the gunship are still being drawn up. But, both commands agree on some key characteristics: a degree of low observability (LO)—not necessarily full stealth—and endurance. The future gunship will look nothing like today’s lumbering platform, and it could actually wind up appearing more like a B-2. “I don’t think the transport next-generation gunship will be on a mobility platform because you are not going to need to carry around all that weight,” says Lt. Gen. Michael Wooley, outgoing Afsoc commander. “If you are not carrying around that big gun and all of that heavy ammunition you don’t need a big [transport] that is in itself vulnerable.” Wooley will be replaced by his current vice commander, Maj. Gen. Donald Wurster, later this year.

ACC has announced it will not push the state-of-the-art for its next-generation bomber, which must be fielded beginning in 2018. That time frame and limited funding are prompting the Air Force to scale back earlier aspirations for a highly stealthy platform equipped with exotic directed-energy weapons. Afsoc has traditionally latched onto the Air Force’s larger buys when procuring a platform in order to prevent having to dedicate funding to a separate development project.

What exactly entails LO is in the trade space that ACC and Afsoc will iron out with contractors. Col. Billy Montgomery, Afsoc’s top planner, says his needs for LO are likely less demanding than for the bomber, though a diminished radar cross section is needed to safely infiltrate hostile airspace and provide support for ground troops. “I think what we are trying to do with our gunship platform is not exactly the same thing that Air Combat Command would want its next-generation bomber to accomplish,” he says. “The level of stealthiness and LO technology is not to the same degree that you’d want a take-down-the-door next-generation bomber or F-22 to have. It would be better than what we are flying around.”

The speed with which anticipated weapons—both directed-energy and kinetic—can be employed allows the command to focus on LO instead of pure stealthiness. LO would involve tactics as well as technology. Special operators still expect to execute their traditional operational concept of orbits for close-air support, and flying in predictable patterns can compromise survivability. However, retractable weapons—rather than the guns protruding from the AC-130 platform—would reduce the time in which the future gunship would be most visible to an adversary’s radar and warning systems. “When [weapons] are as accurate as they are, and as we hope they will continue to prove to be, once you are on station you are going to do what you need to do with great accuracy. So, it is low observability, not no observability,” that is needed, says Wooley.

The existing fleet of AC-130H/U aircraft are anything but LO with four engines and a 105-mm. howitzer protruding from the left side of the aircraft. “We’d be very careful about having weapons tubes that would protrude from that next-generation platform,” Montgomery says.

LO would allow Afsoc to provide more consistent close-air support, including taking operations out of the dark and into daytime, Wooley says. Gunships often operate at low altitudes within range of shoulder-fired missiles and anti-aircraft artillery and they have traditionally operated at night, earning the nickname the night stalkers, for added protection against visual detection.

Afsoc’s need is not as urgent at ACC’s, so planners expect to initiate the gunship platform buy at the tail end of the bomber purchases.

ACC says its bomber will not take advantage of advances in unmanned technology but will require a pilot in the cockpit (AW&ST May 7, p. 30). While Afsoc officials seem to be leaning in the same direction, they’ve not closed the door to an unmanned gunship. “One thing is true. The person on the airplane is the endurance-limiting factor,” Wooley says. “If you can figure out how to take the person out of the airplane, the endurance becomes longer. Then you have to worry about the oil in the engines as the next endurance problem.”

However, Army Gen. Bryan Brown, U.S. Special Operations Command chief, says he wants to be careful not to sever the critical relationship between on-site pilots and special operators on the ground. That relationship has grown since activities in Vietnam and has become something ground soldiers depend on when under fire. “We want that man in the loop . . . . The expectation of the forces that we support is that there is a thinking, breathing, highly trained special operations aviator in the cockpit they can count on,” Montgomery says. “It is very personal. It is very intrinsic to the relationship that we build with our SEAL [sea, air, land] special forces and ranger counterparts.”