That concept represents “a potentially revolutionary capability,” said David Ochmanek, a defense analyst for the Rand Corp. Jeff Latas, USAF’s SFW requirements officer at the Pentagon, said the ability of an aircraft using SFWs to engage several targets at the same time is “something we’ve never had before.” He added, “In one pass, I can drop a whole array of weapons in an optimum fashion, so I can go out and kill many targets with one airplane.” The Air Force doesn’t expect to achieve a hard kill from each projectile, but service officials are confident that little, if anything, would remain on the move after such an attack. Because each B-1B could carry 30 of these SFWs, one heavy bomber would be able to deliver 1,200 projectiles over a huge battle area. Each SFW released by the bombers would be able to cover an area the size of 20 football fields with 40 top-attack projectiles. Air Force planners foresee B-1B heavy bombers taking off from bases in the continental United States, flying halfway around the world, and then delivering a full load of SFWs against large columns of advancing enemy armor. This new anti-armor munition is projected to go a long way toward meeting the Air Force’s goal to be able to find, fix, track, target, and engage any moving ground target anywhere on the surface of the Earth.Īcquisition of the SFW has generated new visions of what future combat will be like. The SFW, in fact, has a proven all-weather, 24-hour operational capability. The SFW is considered 10 times more effective than Vietnam-era cluster munitions, which had only a small chance of hitting their targets. The SFW is the Air Force’s newest wide-area cluster munition, the first of that breed smart enough to find its target after it has been released. The Bahrain deployment marked a coming out event for a weapon that is expected to drastically alter the ability of airpower to engage and stop moving ground targets. The United States Air Force late last year carried out the first operational deployment of the CBU-97/B Sensor Fuzed Weapon when it dispatched two SFW-equipped B-1B bombers to Bahrain.
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