Ukraine’s New Rocket-Boosted Glide-Bombs Can Turn Around And Hit Targets On The Backs Of Hills, 90 Miles Away

The United States is giving Ukraine ground-launched, GPS-guided glide bombs that can strike targets as far as 93 miles away—and even hit them on the reverse slopes of hills.

The Ground-Launched Small Diameter Bomb should roughly double the range of the Ukrainian army’s front-line rocket batteries. But not anytime soon. It might take nine months for the U.S. Defense Department to deliver the bombs.

Ukraine will be the GLSDB’s first user. In 2014, Virginia-based Boeing and Swedish firm Saab formed a partnership in order to develop, test, market and produce the GLSDB. The first trials took place a year later in Sweden.

The munition combines Boeing’s popular 250-pound Small-Diameter Bomb—with its GPS-aided inertial guidance, pop-out wings and different warhead options—with a 350-pound booster borrowed from the old M26 rocket.

“GLSDB provides commanders and planners with a highly flexible weapon that complements existing ballistic trajectory weapons to significantly expand current ground artillery capability,” Boeing stated.

The 227-millimeter-diameter M26, and by extension the GLSDB, is compatible with Lockheed Martin’s High-Mobility Artillery Rocket System.

The United States has pledged to Ukraine 38 of the wheeled rocket launchers. The United Kingdom and Germany meanwhile have pledged a combined 13 Multiple-Launch Rocket Systems—tracked launchers that Lockheed also manufactures, and which fire the same rockets that HIMARS does.

An MLRS can launch 12 M26-size rockets at a time. A HIMARS can launch six. Where a traditional rocket—even a guided one—travels along a simple ballistic arc, a munition with a separable SDB could maneuver backward for what Boeing described as a “reverse-slope” attack.

Simply put, a ground-launched SDB is more maneuverable than a typical rocket is. And its glide capability extends the range of an M26 from 20 miles to 93 miles. The M30 and M31 GPS-guided rockets Ukrainian batteries currently fire travel only around 50 miles under the best conditions.

Some of the most valuable Russian logistical targets in occupied Ukraine are beyond the range of the M30/31s. The GLSDBs could do what the Ukrainians’ dwindling arsenal of 70-mile-range Tochka ballistic missiles and an equally stressed air force currently struggle to do—strike accurately, flexibly and far away … without risking airframes and crews.

That was Boeing’s rationale for developing the ground-launched SDB in the first place. “It really fits across a broader customer set because we’re taking an existing capability, maximizing it and creating an opportunity [for countries] that don’t have the ability to have a robust air force,” Jim Leary, Boeing’s director of global sales and marketing for its weapons portfolio, told reporters in 2019.

GLSDB isn’t the longest-range munition Ukraine has been eyeing. Lockheed also builds a 24-inch-diameter rocket, the Army Tactical Missile System, that’s compatible with HIMARS and MLRS and can range as far as 190 miles with a 500-pound warhead.

Ukrainian officials have been pleading for ATACMS since the first HIMARS launchers arrived in Ukraine early this summer, but U.S. officials have been reluctant to pledge to the Ukrainians munitions that could strike well inside Russian territory from launch positions inside Ukraine.

The rocket-boosted glide-bombs in that sense are a compromise. They lack the impressive range and enormous warhead of the ATACMS, but they still represent a huge improvement over Ukraine’s existing deep-strike munitions.