By Michael Sirak
Lockheed Martin [LMT] continues to pursue enhancements to its Sniper targeting pod as the Air Force and international customers step up to buy more of the combat-proven system, says a company official.
These improvements address both hardware components and software, and are being funded both by the company’s own research dollars and under government sponsorship, said Mark Fischer, Fixed Wing business development representative at Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control.
“We are working with the Air Force now to get on a yearly upgrade cycle for software and potentially some hardware improvements,” Fischer said late last month during a meeting with reporters at the Air Force Association’s 2007 Air and Space Conference and Technology Exposition. “That is a work in progress.”
Since the pod is already designed to be modular, the goal is for these changes to be executed easily in the field or in the factory via swapping line-replaceable units (LRU), he said.
Among the company-funded activities, Fischer said, is development of a low-light-level, high-definition television that would expand the use of the pod in the dark and enhance its combat-identification capability. There is also work being done to expand the utility of the pod’s laser spot tracker in urban environments, he said.
The Air Force already has Snipers equipped with a C-band video downlink capability, said Fischer. This enables real-time TV-quality streaming video to be sent from the pods to joint terminal air controllers on the ground who are responsible for calling in air strikes (Defense Daily, May 24, 2006). The controllers view the imagery via the specialized ruggedized laptop computers called Rovers that they carry. With them, they see the same picture as the pilot sees in the cockpit and can coordinate attacks with the aircrew so as to ensure that the correct target is struck and the potential for collateral effects is minimized.
“The Air Force has said this…gives them really a ten-fold improvement in how timely they can put bombs on target,” Fischer said.
The company has also been investing in a two-way datalink that would allow annotated imagery to be transferred back up to the cockpits for even greater mutual situational awareness and coordination, Fischer said. It has carried out demonstrations of the concept and plans additional work to refine this add-on capability, he noted.
But otherwise, he said, “We are ready to go with two-way if the Air Force wants to do that.”
Lockheed Martin has designed the elements of the two-way datalink to have the same form factor as the one-way version, so they, too, could also be easily exchanged, Fischer said.
“Our intent is [to be] basically a plug-‘n’-play,” he said.
The Sniper features a high-resolution, mid-wave, forward-looking infrared sensor, along with a Charged-Coupled Device TV, dual-mode eye-safe laser, laser spot tracker and an infrared marker. These components give it the ability to provide valuable imagery for the aircrew to improve their situational awareness while they remain at a significant distance to avoid detection and threats. They also allow the crews to steer laser-guided bombs to target and generate targeting coordinates for Global Positioning System-guidance- aided munitions in real time.
The Sniper is the only targeting pod currently being used by F-15E and F-16 fighter aircraft to support operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. The pod has been deployed continuously in that theater since January 2005 and has proven quite valuable in helping to detect insurgents and thwart activities such as IED attacks, the Air Force has said.
In addition to the fighters, the Air Force intends to operate the Sniper on the A-10 ground-attack aircraft and B-1B and B-52H bomber fleets (Defense Daily, Sept. 24, 2006). It recently won contracts for follow-on integration work on the B-1B and to support efforts to marry the pod with the B-52, Fischer said.
Lockheed Martin says it has delivered 143 pods to the Air Force. The service’s program of record is to procure 522 Snipers, but the company expects that this number will grow, since the Air Force’s requirements were generated before the inclusion of the B-1, B-52 and A-10 as platforms on which the pods will fly.
Late last month the company won a new order for 45 Snipers that was made possible through FY ’07 supplemental defense appropriations. This was the largest single order for Snipers to date and brings the total number of pods on order for the Air Force in FY ’07 to 77, Fischer said.
“From the company’s perspective that speaks well to what we are delivering to the warfighter,” he said.
In addition to the Air Force, Lockheed Martin is building the pods for Belgium, Canada, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Poland, Singapore and United Kingdom.
Fischer said he expects additional foreign customers to announce buys of Sniper in the near term.
The company’s current production capacity is 96 pods per year–eight per month– although it is actually facilitized to build 120 per year, Fischer said.