Pentagon Has Tested a Suicide Drone That Gets to Its Target Area at Hypersonic

These kinds of loitering munitions could be employed as area denial weapons, as well. Deploying them over certain areas, such as likely deployment sites for road-mobile ballistic or long-range cruise missiles, could frustrate an opponent's attempt to employ those assets, as well as their efforts to distribute them to multiple locations to help protect them from detection and strikes by other means.

It would be similarly possible to seed them in critical areas in advance of incoming friendly aircraft in order to destroy enemy air defenses, especially if the exact locations of those threats are not known. They could also be used to take out pop up threats, such as road-mobile air defense systems, or other targets of opportunity.

A "multi-role" weapon design that can accept "modular payloads" also means that these loitering munitions could take on non-kinetic strike missions, such as intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance and electronic warfare. Depending on how the Pentagon, and now the Army, envisions employing the Vintage Racer system, it might be possible to deploy them in networked autonomous swarms, where different configured variants take on various roles. Sensor carrying versions could spot targets for ones with kinetic payloads or direct those with electronic warfare jammers to scramble enemy air defenses. 

A swarm, by its very nature, might also just be able to overwhelm and confuse an opponent by striking en masse from various different directions at once. The briefing slide that Secretary McCarthy examined in October 2019 specifically noted that the Vintage Racer would hopefully be "inexpensive to deploy," but "costly to defeat." The goal is for each munition to cost between $100,000 and $200,000, a fraction of what the U.S. military is paying for cruise missiles, for instance. 

The briefing slide also said that modular loitering munition might be able to take on non-combat "support roles," as well, mentioning "position, navigation, and timing," or PNT, as well as "networked communications in a contested environment. The U.S. military, as a whole, is looking increasingly at a concept called Assured PNT as potential threats to the GPS satellite-based navigation system grow. 

The basic idea behind Assured PNT, which you can read about more in these past War Zone pieces, is to use various means to distribute navigation system nodes across various platforms throughout the battlespace, and networking them together. The result is an ecosystem that can provide accurate and reliable position information without having to rely on GPS. Similarly, distributed communications nodes could help overcome enemy electronic warfare attacks. Beyond the Vintage Racer system's ability to provide a useful addition layer in these concepts, its rapidly deployable nature could make it an important means of filling connectivity gaps during critical operations.

It's worth noting that the Army actually teased the idea of using its future Precision Strike Missile (PrSM) quasi-ballistic missile as a way to deploy loitering intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance drones deep into enemy territory in order to provide targeting information back in 2018. Employing a mobile, ground-launched platform could further increase the system's flexibility.

Lockheed Martin is developing PrSM ostensibly as a replacement for the service's existing Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) quasi-ballistic missiles. The Army and Lockheed Martin are also now testing a multi-mode guidance system for these missiles that could enable them to engage large moving targets, such as ships. There had previously been talk about giving ATACMS a similar moving target capability. 

In the 1990s and early 2000s, the Army had worked on a version of the ATACMS that would carry a payload of 13 Brilliant Anti-Tank (BAT) submunitions, which has some broad similarities to the idea of launching drones using the PrSM, as well as the Vintage Racer concept. BAT was a small unpowered glide bomb that used acoustic sensors to find its targets and imaging infrared seeker to home in on them. The Army ultimately canceled the BAT-filled ATACMS project, though the weapons themselves evolved into the GBU-44/B Viper Strike air-launched glide bomb.

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