The U.S. Air Force has launched a new effort, nicknamed Golden Horde, to network together various precision-guided munitions, including the GBU-39/B Small Diameter Bomb and the AGM-158 Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile, as well as the ADM-160 Miniature Air-Launched Decoy, so that they can operate as autonomous swarms after launch. This could help them penetrate past or otherwise overwhelm enemy air defenses, as well as maximize the effects on particular targets or engage completely new ones that may suddenly appear over the course their flight. U.S. Air Force Brigadier General Anthony Genatempo, the service’s Program Executive Officer for Weapons, offered the first details about Golden Horde at a media roundtable on the sidelines of the Life Cycle Industry Days at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio on June 20, 2019. The officer also announced that Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), which is leading this new swarming munition effort, had canceled an earlier program known as Gray Wolf. This project, which The War Zone previously explored in detail, had sought to develop an entirely new family of low-cost swarming cruise missiles.

Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman had been working on experimental Gray Wolf prototypes since December 2017, but the Air Force appears to have determined that the program is unlikely to produce practical results in the near term. The first phase of Gray Wolf program will end either this month or next month, after which the Air Force will not proceed with two previously planned phases, according to Air Force Magazine. The service had originally planned to continue the swarming cruise missile effort through at least 2024. A Lockheed Martin press release announcing the Air Force's initial contract award in December 2017 had also said that there would be four developmental phases, indicating that the Air Force had already scaled back the project before canceling it outright.

USAF A briefing slide describing the now-canceled Gray Wolf program.

We don't know the exact reasons why the Air Force canceled Gray Wolf, but Golden Horde's plans to focus on ways to network together existing munitions seems like a lower risk proposition than developing an entirely new weapon system. It seems likely that Golden Horde would leverage at least some of the work done on Gray Wolf, too. Brigadier General Genatempo said that lessons learned from the U.S.-led cruise missile strikes on chemical weapons sites in Syria in April 2018 and other feedback from operational units also played a role in the decision. "The success of that mission [in Syria] was from a huge amount of mission planning, because each of those weapons was dropped at a certain time and had a preplanned flight," Genatempo explained. "There was no thinking or talking amongst themselves as to, 'You know what? The first two of us that got here 4 minutes earlier, we actually took out this target, so the two of you that were coming in behind us just to make sure, you can go to Target B.' And within that 4-minute flight time, there would be time to adjust to go target B." Weapons such as the AGM-158 and the forthcoming GBU-53/B StormBreaker, previously known as the Small Diameter Bomb II, featuring multi-mode targeting systems that include imaging infrared seekers. These already helps increase precision and enable greater autonomy since the weapons can identify and home in on their targets independently after reaching the designated area by using their own internal imagery database.

Anonymous AGM-158 JASSM missiles loaded on a B-1 Bone bomber ahead of the strikes in Syria in April 2018.

With increased networking capability, these weapons could send back images of the target right before impact that show the extent of the damage. This data, in turn, could feed into a computer algorithm that would automatically shift other weapons still in flight to new targets after a certain amount of destruction. A manned operator could also make the final decision after the system alerted them to the developing situation. With such a system in place, a launch platform might not even have to designate targets before releasing a swarm of weapons, with those bombs and missiles using a pre-programmed hierarchy of priority to focus and refocus on targets as they appear and get destroyed. This would also enable the swarm to quickly turn its attention to pop-up threats, such as point air defense systems, and engage them first, to reduce the threat to the rest of the swarm. All of this would also reduce the risk to the aircraft employing the weapons, as they would have more flexibility in planning routes and avoid enemy defenses before and after launch. “What our warfighter is really interested in is, if I have a very large weapons truck like an F-15[E Strike Eagle] or like one of our bombers that can drop multiple of these munitions, is there a way to act in such a way to provide better effects on targets?" Genatempo added. "Or better ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] back to a command-and-control node?"

USAF An F-15E Strike Eagle carrying a load of 20 GBU-39/B Small Diameter Bombs.