The Aerial Gunnery Gap: Challenged Programs, New Combat Aircraft Opportunities and Designs

This paper describes a yawning Aerial Gunnery Gap which has adversely affected combat aircraft designs, led to a number of avoidable program-threatening accidents and incidents, unnecessarily driven costs of modern combat aircraft and threatened mission effectiveness. The paper starts with an overview of robust aerial gunnery development which began in 1913 and continued till the late 1990's. The development of the M-50 and PGU-series ammunition are chronicled along with many research projects centered on extending ranges and increasing Pk which guided aircraft design and aerial engagement philosophies for decades. The last advanced aerial gunnery program pursued by the USAF is detailed along with an assessment of how close the USAF was to achieving the three main aerial combat holy grails related to gunnery: i.) Guided Offensive Aerial Gunnery, ii.) Counter-Missile/Defensive Aerial Gunnery, iii.) Aerial Indirect Fire Support. The cancellation of the Barrel-Launched Adaptive Munition (BLAM) program in 1998 was followed by a quarter-century of divestment in aerial gunnery RDT&E by the DoD. In that time, entire research groups were disbanded and critical, one-of-a-kind gunnery ranges and laboratories were dismantled. The paper shows how this gap has harmed US National Security, induced avoidable gun-related problems with aircraft like the F-35, led to debilitating restrictions on combat aircraft design approaches and trade spaces and produced nontrivial growths in weight, volume and life-cycle costs of combat airplanes and helicopters. The paper concludes with an assessment of current advanced aerial gunnery rounds and shows that nontrivial savings in combat aircraft program costs could be realized by promising new families of aerial gunnery ammunition along with novel aircraft designs.