DARPA Is Developing Aircraft-Launched Missile-Like Drones That Fire Their Own Air-To-Air Missiles
The LongShot program could enable aircraft to engage aerial threats further away, remain less vulnerable while doing so, and much more.
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The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, has hired General Atomics, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman, to craft designs for an air-launched missile-toting air-to-air combat drone as part of a program called LongShot. In concept, a larger manned aircraft would fire this unmanned air vehicle, which could then fly to a certain area and engage multiple aerial threats with its own weapons. This, in turn, would extend the range of the launch platform and reduce its vulnerability to hostile aircraft or air defenses, among many other benefits.
"The LongShot program changes the paradigm of air combat operations by demonstrating an unmanned, air-launched vehicle capable of employing current and advanced air-to-air weapons," Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Paul Calhoun, the LongShot program manager, said in a statement. "LongShot will disrupt traditional incremental weapon improvements by providing an alternative means of generating combat capability."
At its most basic, the idea behind LongShot is to put extra distance between the launching aircraft and the aerial threat or threats it is targeting. This increases the range at which those targets can be engaged, which also allows the launch platform to stay further away, potentially outside of the range of counterattack.
However, unlike just any very-long-range air-to-air missile, LongShot offers a way to engage targets at greater distances, but only actually firing a missile much closer to the target, when the missile's energy state will still be high. The idea is that this would give the enemy much less time to react or the ability to evade, increasing the likelihood of a kill. Though not specifically mentioned in DARPA's discussions of the program so far, this system would also enable a single launching aircraft to engage threats from multiple vectors at once, making it even more difficult for opponents to survive an attack.
If the LongShot vehicle is a stealthy design that is hard to detect, to begin with, and can be cued to the target area via an offboard platform or platforms using hard to detect low-probability of intercept data links, there is an even greater chance of the system effectively ambushing the threat or threats. Using a non-LPI/LPD data link, such as one using the popular Link 16 waveform, that goes into receive-only mode after a certain point in the flight, could also be a less complex way to keep the system "silent" in the electromagnetic spectrum. With sufficiently robust networking capabilities, the drone itself would not need to carry any complex sensors to track targets and engage targets.
DARPA's LongShot concept art, seen at the top of this story, shows a stealthy cruise missile-like vehicle, with pop-out fins and rear-mounted air-breathing engine, firing two smaller air-to-air missiles. The concept art also shows a panel falling away, which appears to keep the LongShot's internal weapons bay sealed until the moment of launch. This would help keep the unmanned aircraft in its most stealthy and efficient configuration until the last possible moment.
In addition, a bomber-sized aircraft carrying a large number of these missile-laden drones could be a particularly potent combination. The Air Force itself has already suggested that its sixth-generation "fighter jet" could actually turn out to be something like a variant of the B-21 Raider stealth bomber loaded with air-to-air missiles and working together with smaller "loyal wingman" type unmanned aircraft.
There's also no particular reason why an advanced and fully-autonomous unmanned combat air vehicle (UCAV) couldn't also launch LongShots. The Air Force, as well as the Navy, have already conducted significant UCAV development work in cooperation with companies, such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman, but these kinds of unmanned aircraft continue to be described vaguely as potential components of aerial fleets at some unspecified time in the future. This curious lack of active UCAV programs, at least publicly, is something The War Zone has explored in detail in the past.
It's not clear whether DARPA intends for the LongShot vehicle to be recoverable and/or reusable in any way under any circumstances. A heavily networked design could help keep costs low by eliminating the need for these drones to carry costly sensors themselves, relying instead on off-board platforms for that targeting information.
"In later phases of the program, LongShot will construct and fly a full-scale air-launched demonstration system capable of controlled flight, before, during, and after weapon ejection under operational conditions," DARPA did say in its press release.
All told, it will be very interesting to learn more about the prospective LongShot designs and see how DARPA refines the proposed concepts of operation surrounding this novel air-to-air combat system in the coming months.
