Going to War - GPS Declassified: From Smart Bombs to Smartphones - page 106

Fig. 7.1. agm- 86c/d conventional air-launched cruise missile. The first gps- guided
missiles used by the Air Force were modified agm- 86b cruise missiles with conven-
tional bombs replacing nuclear weapons, but they looked identical. (usaf photograph)
Only seven other gps-guided missiles were used in the Persian Gulf War—
all of them Navy agm-84 standoff land attack missiles, or slams. That weap-
on's development flowed from circumstances similar to those the Air Force
experienced in Libya. The Navy sought to put more distance between its pilots
and surface-to-air missiles after losing aircraft in raids on Syrian-backed forces
in Lebanon during the 1980s. When an a-6 Intruder and an a-7 Corsair were
shot down in 1983, the Navy began modifying the twenty-year-old a- 6 aircraft
and created a new training program for strike pilots. 12 After two more a- 6 air-
craft were lost in 1986, the Navy began developing slams. 13 Like the Air Force,
the Navy did not start from scratch. The slam combined the airframe, turbo-
jet propulsion system, and ive-hundred-pound warhead of the Navy's antiship
Harpoon missile with a gps-aided inertial navigation system and targeting
technologies borrowed from other missiles. Such targeting technologies
included an infrared sensor that transmitted video to the cockpit of an accom-
panying plane and an electronic data link that allowed the plane's weapons
officer the ability to control the missile's aim point using the video image. 14
The nearly ifteen-foot, 1,400-pound missile could fly slightly more than six
hundred miles per hour to hit targets up to sixty-eight miles away. (Newer ver-
sions have extended the range to 143 miles.) 15 The slam was the Navy's new-
est weapon when Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990; it had never been fired
in combat, and fewer than fifty test missiles were available. 16 a- 6 Intruders