I recently wrote Protecting Navy Seals, a diary about the shabby condition of our relatively small fixed wing gunship fleet. These converted cargo planes pack a punch like a naval escort vessel and they are often found standing guard over special forces as they do their work.
This is a complex, relatively obscure area of military acquisition and there are signs of both innovation as well as the stress we’ve put on the gunships, running them at three or four times their expected operation tempo for the last decade.
The Harvest Hawk and Dragon Spear are two answers to the question of how to protect small special forces units in the field. Some of this is a natural evolution of the various C-130 platforms and some of it is pressing equipment into service due to wartime needs.
First, for those who don’t pay attention to such things, it’s entirely normal for our armed forces to just start inventing their own stuff out in the field during wartime. During World War II PT boat commander John F. Kennedy’s PT-109 was fitted with a 37mm anti-tank gun appropriated from ground forces. Prior to the acquisition of the nearly 10,000 MRAP vehicles our HUMVEE fleet was subjected to an amazing number of “in theater” protective experiments.
The Lockheed C-130 and today’s smart weapons are a bit more complex than the bombers and machine guns of World War II, so field mods are not the order of the day. I’ve found two instances where aircraft similar to our existing AC-130H Specter and AC-130U Spooky are receiving weapons transplants.
The Harvest Hawk is a KC-130J Super Hercules based tanker that can go armed when needed.
The newer KC-130J can fly slow enough to refuel helicopters, just as the KC-130F it replaces, but it’s fast enough to refuel jets, and it has a special type of propeller that can be feathered when it’s on the ground. This feathering cuts the prop wash by 75%, reducing the dust and flying grit while the plane idles as it transfers up to 600 gallons a minute to ground vehicles.
The Harvest Hawk packs four Hellfire missiles on a hardpoint and there is an infrared/visual light camera system that is attached to one of the wing fuel tanks. I can’t find a photo, but there is a new glide bomb called the Griffin, which can apparently ride three up on a Hellfire mounting rail, or go ten at a time in a launcher tube.
The MC-130W Dragon Spear is a conversion of existing older C-130H MC-130W Combat Spear tankers for gunship duty. The reporting here is muddled, but the plan seems to be the same weapons as placed on the Harvest Hawk, plus a “roll on” package that will provide a gun.
This drawing of an AC-130U Spooky should give you a sense of what they’re planning. A gun like the planned 30mm cannon requires a crew of two, one who does targeting and another who coordinates with the pilot and the special forces on the ground. They’ll have a modular control room that will be placed aboard via the rear ramp. The gun itself will apparently live in a pod mounted to a hardpoint under one wing.
The Harvest Hawk seems an organic extension of the tanker's role - it's already going out with a pack of V-22 Osprey to deliver troops, so if it sprouts the ability to back them with some firepower that's a fine thing.
The Dragon Spear is also a plane that's right in the thick of things, but this seems more a compromise in the negative sense of the word, something being done because we've failed to make the needed investments in our fixed wing gunship fleet.
The best thing for the long haul would seem to be getting the smaller, lighter, easier to service AC-27J twin engined gunship completed, but this was canceled outright in 2010. I'm not sure if it could be revived. I'm going to investigate this matter further, probably focusing next on the particulars of the terminated light gunship project.