At a luncheon briefing at Sea Air Space 2017, Jack Crisler, Lockheed’s Vice President for F-35 Business Development and Strategy Integration, told reporters his company was still having active discussions with the U.S. military on how to quickly add the Enhanced Paveway II to the Joint Strike Fighter's weapon "menu." Regardless of if and when the GBU-49/B becomes available for the F-35, it will be the second work-around for EOTS' long-standing moving target deficiency.

So, in February 2017, the Air Force posted a notice on FedBizOpps, the U.S. government’s main contracting website, asking for immediate proposals for a 500-pound class bomb for the F-35 with an integral moving-target capability. This requirement matched the description of the GBU-49/B, which the Pentagon ultimately picked as an interim solution.

If the F-35 still lacks the ability to hit tanks and trucks on the move when those tests kick off, it might almost guarantee an embarrassing outcome for the stealthy fighter and reinforce criticisms that the jets are still far from combat ready . The A-10 – as well as fourth generation fighters such as the F-15E Strike Eagle and F-16C Viper – can carry newer targeting pods, including Lockheed's own Sniper Advanced Targeting Pod (ATP), which have laser-lead capability. In addition, weapons, such as Raytheon’s GBU-49/B Enhanced Paveway II and the company's still in development Small Diameter Bomb II, have this functionality built into the weapon itself.

Throughout the course of the Joint Strike Fighter project, critics have repeatedly panned the Joint Strike Fighter’s ability to conduct air strikes in support of ground operations in general, often pointing to the much more impressive armament and low-level flying characteristics of the blunt-nosed A-10 Warthog . To try and settle the argument, American legislators have mandated a fly-off between the two aircraft, which Pleus has said is slated to start in 2018 .

Unfortunately, the Pentagon needs more options now. “The ability to hit a moving target is a key capability that we need in current close-air support fight,” Air Force Brigadier General Scott Pleus, in charge of the service’s F-35 integration office, told DefenseNews in February 2017.

So, as of April 2017, a pilot in one of the U.S. Air Force’s F-35As in their Block 3i configuration has to manually gauge where to point the laser to try and hit a moving target. The Marine Corps’ less advanced Block 2B package lacks any automated functionality, as well. Lockheed and the Pentagon are working to address this issue in the up-coming Block 3F software and hardware, but have suggested the Joint Strike Fighters may not have a full moving-target "laser-lead" capability until the Block 4 upgrades begin to arrive, which is unlikely to occur before 2020, and likely some time after.

At the core of the issue is the F-35's on board electro-optical targeting system (EOTS). While the sensor package can detect and track moving objects, it can't hit them automatically. This is because there is no so-called "laser-lead" function, which would do the math to tell bombs and missiles how far ahead they'd need to fly to actually hit fast-moving land vehicles or boats .

At the Navy’s League’s Sea Air Space 2017 convention and exhibition, The War Zone learned ATK Orbital believes its Hatchet and Hammer miniature bombs might be a good fit for Lockheed's F-35 Joint Strike Fighters. The jets sorely need more firepower in their stealthiest configuration, but they still can't attack fast-moving targets on the ground at all, a key capability for aircraft supporting troops on the ground.

The Pentagon knew at the beginning of the Joint Strike Fighter program that moving targets would pose a problem. When Lockheed subsequently developed EOTS, laser-lead technology was still coming of age. So the initial plan was to arm the jets with advanced cluster bombs to make up for the shortcoming. These Wind-Corrected Munitions Dispenser-Extended Range (WCMD-ER) dispensers, guided by a combination of GPS and inertial navigation system (INS), full of BLU-108/B Sensor Fuzed Munitions (SFMs) would be an interim fix until a more permanent solution came online. Each SFM consists of four, independent explosively-formed penetrator warheads, which ultimately separate from the main body and fall toward their targets. Each one detonates when its on board dual-mode infrared sensor picks up a vehicle. If it doesn’t find one, it explodes on impact with the ground. A fragmenting ring does give the weapon the ability to kill nearby soft-targets, like people, as well but this system is a far cry from Cold War-era containers full of unreliable hand grenade-sized bomblets. The U.S. military designated the WCMD-ER with 10 BLU-108/Bs as the CBU-105/B Sensor Fuzed Weapon (SFW). You can read all about this weapon here. But it goes without saying that a cluster bomb intended to strike groups of targets is very different from a missile or bomb outfitted with a unitary warhead intended to focus one individual point of impact. Dropping 10 submunitions to attack terrorists in a lone pickup truck would never have been cost-effective nor uncontroversial. It also wouldn't have been precise enough to hit specific small vehicles in congested urban areas, which would've increased the risk of collateral damage and civilian casualties. In short, the weapon was always going to be an imperfect solution. Now it's a moot issue.

USAF U.S. Air Force airmen load a a practice GBU-12/B onto an F-35A.

On June 19, 2008, then Secretary of Defense Robert Gates declared the United States’ intent to dramatically scale back the use and sale of these cluster bombs. In his memorandum, he cited changing international norms and a moral imperative to protect innocent civilians from unexploded ordnance during and after conflicts. After 2018, American troops couldn’t use cluster munitions – including bombs and shells – where more than one percent of the submunitions wouldn’t reliably go off. In the interceding decade, regional commanders would have to approve their employment on a case-by-case basis. This appeared largely designed to calm officials on the Korean Peninsula, whose war plans relied heavily on beating back hordes of North Korean armored vehicles with SFMs. The new rules were a product of an increasingly vocal campaign in favor of the international Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM), which had banned signatories from building, using or exporting weapons that met very specific definitions eight years earlier. CCM did not prohibit members from stockpiling weapons that had fewer than 10 submunitions each weighing less than approximately 8.8 pounds, would detect and engage single targets, and had electronic self-destruct and electronic self-deactivating features. Though relatively minor modifications would have made the CBU-105 compliant with the CCM, the international stigma against cluster munitions became too much for defense contractor Textron. In September 2016, the firm announced it would no longer make the SFM. This succession of events sent Lockheed and the Pentagon scrambling for another solution to the F-35’s moving target problem. And this is where Hatchet and Hammer begin to come into the picture.

Texcoco/Wikimedia The CBU-105/B and its components on display at at the 2008 Singapore Airshow.

Unveiled in 2012, Hatchet is an approximately eight-pound miniature guided bomb with a three and a half pound blast-fragmentation warhead. Though still in development, ATK Orbital plans to offer the weapons with GPS/INS guidance alone, or a combination of that navigation system and a laser, infrared sensor or even an active-radar homing arrangement akin to European consortium MBDA’s Brimstone, a company representative told The War Zone on the floor of Sea Air Space 2017. Thanks to advancements in so-called "alternative warhead" technology, it only reportedly takes six of them to saturate an area the size of a football field with deadly fragments. Relying on inert shrapnel rather than bomblets, the Pentagon's goal with these warheads has been create cluster bomb-like effects without any potential for hazardous unexploded ordnance ATK Orbital has been working closely with U.S. Special Operations Command on the project, which would be ideal for attacking specific terrorists while reducing unintended casualties. Hatchet and similar designs promise to make a variety of small unmanned aircraft, many of which previously only had the payload capacity to carry out limited surveillance missions, lethal attackers as well. American special operators would likely employ the weapon from a variety of drones or the multi-mission launcher on newer AC-130 gunships. It is possible a miniature munition such as Hatchet killed Al Qaeda’s number two Abu Khayr al Masri, a son-in-law to the late Osama Bin Laden, in Syria in February 2017.

USAF A U.S. Air Force airman prepares to load a CBU-103/B cluster bomb, similar to the CBU-105/B, onto an A-10 Warthog.