Special Operations gunships to be equipped with improved sensors.

• Author: Harper, Jon

Air Force Special Operations Command plans to fly small, tactical offboard drones from its AC-130 gunships in combat for the first time later this year, which will give crews better views of the battlefield.

Tactical off-board sensing, or TOBS, is intended to improve AFSOC's targeting capabilities in poor weather or other challenging conditions.

Gunship crews spend a lot of time "looking at tops of clouds... [thinking], 'I wish the weather would clear. Damn, I'd like to shoot what's down there but damn I can't see it,'" said Lt. Gen. Bradley Heithold, commander of AFSOC, at a Special Operations/Low-Intensity Conflict conference hosted by the National Defense Industrial Association.

To solve the problem, commandos want to deploy unmanned aerial vehicles out of AC-130 gunships to provide critical intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance support.

"The concept is to launch a UAV, get it below the weather and it functions ... almost like a sensor on the airplane," Bill Lane, AFSOC's chief of strike and ISR requirements, said in a recent interview. "The crew puts a UAV in an orbit around a place over the target area and it flies itself... It's more or less autonomous in an area that you tell it to go

to], and then you operate a sensor on the UAV just like you're operating your sensor on the airplane to identify targets."

AFSOC has tested TOBS technologies at training ranges, but the command is about to put them in the field. AFSOC plans to train AC-130 crews to use the technology and then deploy about four to six systems in the coming months, Lane said.

"We would like to send it downrange with the crews... to use on combat missions when the circumstances are right," he said.

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The crews will help the command develop tactics, techniques and procedures and understand the technology better, he added.

U.S. commandos have been active in a number of warzones in the greater Middle East and elsewhere. Officials have not yet determined in which areas of operations the technology will be employed, Lane said.

Initially, AFSOC will utilize Raytheon's Coyote small UAV for the tactical offboard sensing mission.

"It's a system off-the-shelf that's already been developed," Lane said. "Contractors have already demonstrated it out of a common launch tube [like those on the AC-130]. It's something that we could very quickly integrate on the airplane, train crews and try to learn from."

But the Coyote is not the long-term solution that the...