CRUISE missiles are about to get a whole lot scarier. Existing flying bombs
are told exactly where to go. But the US Air Force is now developing a cheap
cruise missile that chooses its own targets.
Once launched, the cruise missile will patrol the skies and hunt down
armoured vehicles, tanks, surface-to-air missile batteries and even Scud
missiles. It will even be smart enough to take evasive action when attempts are
made to shoot it down.
The idea, says Ken Edwards, project director at the Air Force Research
Laboratory (AFRL) in Eglin, Florida, is to send the low-cost autonomous attack
system (LOCAAS) missiles into areas where military intelligence has little
information on targets. They will be dropped in bunches of four by aircraft
(see Diagram).
The missiles, which are powered by a small turbojet engine, will then
head to the target area and initiate a search pattern. A major advantage of the
technology is that this kind of mission would normally risk a fighter pilot鈥檚
life.
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Another goal, says Edwards, is to keep the cost of a missile well under
$100 000鈥攃onsiderably less than the million-dollar price tag of a
Tomahawk cruise missile. He says the savings come from having a single,
self-sufficient system for navigation and tracking. In addition to a GPS
satellite navigation system, the missiles use lidar鈥攁 laser-based radar
system鈥攖o sense the lie of the land.
Besides gleaning navigational information from the laser reflections, the
AFRL team have also devised a technique for identifying targets based on their
reflected laser 鈥渇ingerprint鈥�. A LOCAAS missile will be able to identify a
number of target types and prioritise them, says Edwards. So if it seeks a Scud
and fails to find one, it will look for the next target category.
A unique feature of LOCAAS is an ability to adapt its warhead to suit the
type of target: if it decides to destroy a missile launch pad, it first
fragments a metal rod in its warhead to cause the most damage with multiple
impacts. But if its target is a tank, it keeps the rod intact to lend it maximum
density for penetrating armour.
There are bound to be fears about having such destructive weapons flying
around with no one controlling them or choosing the targets. After all, in the
Kosovo conflict, even NATO pilots were sometimes unable to distinguish between
tanks and fleeing refugees. The designers will have to prove their automated
targeting system is reliable and that the device can fail safely when it runs
out of fuel.
Yet according to Tom Anderson, an expert in systems reliability at the
University of Newcastle, engineering such a weapon shouldn鈥檛 be too difficult.
He says it鈥檚 feasible that a system such as LOCAAS might actually prove safer
than today鈥檚 weapons. 鈥淗umans are far from infallible,鈥� he says, as was
demonstrated last year during the Kosovo conflict when, according to the
official version of events, CIA officers using out-of-date maps accidentally
targeted the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.