The Marines are a thoughtful, learning organization, which is why they threw together a new sorta-gunship to kill insurgents cheaply:
When the Marines boosted their forces in Afghanistan last year, they discovered they didn’t have the kind of on-call air support they needed to deal with pop-up groups of insurgents across a wide battlefield. “Because of the dispersed nature of our force, we suffered some casualties,” Trautman said.
That was the impetus for the Marines’ nine new gunship kits for its KC-130 tankers, pictured. The idea is to arm an airplane that’s going to be nearby, anyways, giving it just enough firepower to deal with insurgents that Trautman described as “un-determined.”
“We’re not building an [Air Force] AC-130,” with precision sensors and a vast weapons load-out, he said. “We’re building a roll-on, roll-off capability that can be put on existing KC-130s.”
The “soul of the system,” he said, will be a targeting pods “mounted on a wing station,” plus wing-mounted Hellfire missiles or gliding Viper Strike missiles tossed out the back. A gun firing out the side door is a less likely addition. The system is meant to be installed in just four hours.
This is just one example of the quickly-fielded, just-in-time, just-good-enough modularity we can expect to see in counter-insurgency air power:
We’re seeing it with the Air Force’s MC-12W spy planes, quickly modified from King Air twin props. We’re seeing it with drone designs, like the Predator family, that can be bough cheaply and therefore continuously replaced with better models. Plus, the Air Force is talking about buying gun kits for its T-6 trainers to turn them into “instant” insurgent killers.