For four decades, the AC-130 gunship has rained down destruction on enemies from the Ho Chi Min Trail in Vietnam to the mountains of Afghanistan.
The storied gunships, however, may be grounded within the next two years.
The problem is stress on the 17 U-models? center wing boxes, said Maj. Gen. Donald Wurster, vice commander of the Air Force Special Operations Command.
The Air Force thought it would have to replace the boxes, which form the attachment point for the aircraft’s wings above the fuselage, around 2013 to 2014, but their increased use in Iraq, Afghanistan and other operations, has moved that date up to 2009.
“There’s a chance we’ll have most of the fleet grounded simultaneously ... We’ve got to find a way to prevent that,” Wurster said at a National Defense Industrial Association special operations conference.
The AC-130 is a heavily armed aircraft with side-firing weapons that employs advanced sensors to identify targets, destroy them if necessary, and carry out battlefield damage assessments. Because it flies at low altitudes at fixed patterns, it’s highly vulnerable to attack in daylight and AFSOC does not allow the aircraft to perform operations past dawn.
“We’re flying three gunships in Iraq almost all night long. They make a tremendous difference on the battlefield — killing bad guys and doing over-the-shoulder watch,” he added.
There are 17 of the newer AC-130U “Spooky” aircraft and eight of the Vietnam-era AC-130H “Spectres” in the fleet. The typical aircraft is flying about 137 hours per month in theater. Its peacetime tempo is 35 hours per month, he said.
The AC-130 fleet, while small, has a celebrated history. It was credited with destroying 10,000 North Vietnamese trucks in Southeast Asia. It has served in conflicts large and small, from Operation Desert Storm in Iraq to Somalia in the early 1990s, and again in January when they went after suspected al-Qaida militants there.
While the wing boxes may be prematurely aging, most of its armaments and sensors are state of the art. Both the U- and H-models carry 105 mm cannons. The Spookies are also being outfitted with new 30 mm Bushmaster cannons, and have twice the munitions capacity of the older Spectres. The U-models can engage two different targets at once.
Both models carry a sensor suite that uses infrared and radar. The Spookies also employ a synthetic aperture strike radar for long-range target detection, according to an Air Force fact sheet.
While some have called for the Air Force to begin work on a new gunship — one that is survivable in the daytime — Wurster said the service is not planning to replace the aircraft. For now, it believes that a proposed long-range bomber will be able to duplicate some of its capabilities.
A new long-range bomber wouldn’t come online until 2018 at the earliest, Air Force officials have said. But so far, the program to develop a next-generation bomber remains conceptual.
Richard Aboulafia, an aerospace analyst for the Teal Group, called the idea of using long-range strike aircraft to take up the slack from the AC-130 “unusual.”
“It’s a notional concept and the idea of waiting to recapitalize an aging asset for some notional asset sounds impractical,” Aboulafia said.
Other than the 2018 date, there is no roadmap for the long-range bomber. “It’s like a 15th Century map with the words ‘here there be dragons,’” he said. And because no one has a firm idea of what shape the bomber will take, some in the Air Force are attaching any number of missions to the program.
“I’m surprised it hasn’t become an air-to-air refueling tanker,” he said.
With a temporary grounding of the Spookies possible in 2009, and a long-range bomber decades away, Wurster said the issue is what to do in the meantime.
There are other air-to-ground weapon systems for both day and night missions. But for the special operations forces on the ground who have grown accustomed to the AC-130 for close air support, it is a cultural issue, he said.
An F-15 Strike Eagle or a Predator B can place a bomb on a target, he noted. It’s not always necessary to have a gunship.
But there is a close bond between the 13-member AC-130 crew and ground forces, Wurster said. The airmen will say “just around the corner there are four guys who look like they’re coming around the corner to shoot you. Do you want us to kill them? Yeah, please do,” is the response.
“Our ground forces are extremely comfortable with the professionalism and the commitment of the AC-130 crews,” Wurster said.
The question is whether special operators will trust a Predator B, for example, to be there when it’s needed.
“That relationship between that [AC-130] platform and those people on the ground is a very strong bond,” he added.
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