Ukrainian Pilots Could Toss Their New GPS-Guided Bombs 50 Miles Behind Russian Lines

The United States is supplying Ukraine with winged, GPS-guided bombs, Bloomberg reported.

The Joint Direct Attack Munition-Extended Range lends itself to a special bombing method—one that adds miles to its already significant range.

Flying low and fast toward the front line, a Ukrainian jet lugging a load of JDAM-ERs would pitch up and “toss” the bombs like a softball pitcher underhanding strikes.

Toss-bombing JDAM-ERs could be the key to a new aerial campaign for Ukraine. Ukrainian squadrons that currently are limited to striking no farther than a few miles from the front could, with their new bombs, blast Russian forces 50 miles away.

The U.S. Defense Department is being coy about the GPS-guided bombs. Unspecified “precision aerial munitions” were part of a $1.9-billion aid package the Pentagon announced in December.

The New York Times reported that the munitions are JDAMs. Bloomberg specified that they’re JDAM-ERs. The Pentagon reportedly expects Boeing to deliver the bombs no later than the end of June.

JDAM is a $25,000, bolt-on kit that includes a GPS seeker and long vanes for maneuvering. The kit transforms a 500- , 1,000- or 2,000-pound dumb bomb into a smart bomb.

JDAM-ER adds pop-out wings to the basic kit. The wings help the bomb glide, boosting its range from a few miles to nearly 50 miles under the right conditions.

The U.S. Air Force—the world’s biggest user of JDAMs—lately has been fighting wars against low-tech foes with no serious air-defenses, so it tends to drop JDAMs from medium altitude.

The Ukrainian air force doesn’t have that luxury. The air space over Ukraine is some of the most dangerous in the world for a fast-jet pilot. Ukraine and Russia each lost around 60 fixed-wing warplanes in the first year of the current war.

Today it’s rare for a Russian or Ukrainian tactical jet to cross the line of contact and strike targets deep inside enemy territory. The Russian air force of course can conduct deep strikes by firing long-range cruise missiles from heavy bombers that never leave Russian air space.

Those Russian deep strikes tend to target homes, churches, hospitals and other civilian infrastructure as part of Russia’s wider terror campaign. They don’t have a lot of military value.

With JDAM-ER, the Ukrainian air force could do with its Mikoyan MiG-29 and Sukhoi Su-27 fighters and Sukhoi Su-24 bombers what the Russian air force does with its Tupolev Tu-95 and Tupolev Tu-160 heavy bombers—but hit targets whose destruction actually contributes to Ukraine’s war effort. Bridges. Supply depots. Troop concentrations. Headquarters.

The Ukrainian planes would fly low to minimize the risk of detection by Russian radars and, at the last second, pull up to give the GPS-guided bombs upward trajectory. The pilots could “turn tail while the bombs each autonomously fly to their targets,” Carlo Kopp, an analyst with Air Power Australia, wrote about JDAM-ER toss-bombing.

It’s going to take a little effort on the part of U.S. and Ukrainian technicians. Australian engineers had NATO-style warplanes in mind when they developed the munition that eventually became the JDAM-ER. For the glide-bomb to work on, say, a Ukrainian MiG-29, the MiG needs a new pylon and some way to transmit data to the bomb.

Fortunately for the Ukrainians, a lot of the conceptual work already is done. When the United States supplied Ukraine with High-Speed Anti-Radiation Missiles last spring, it also supplied Ukraine with custom pylons for MiG-29s and Su-27s.

A slightly different custom pylon—one including a “Mil-Std-1760C” digital data bus—could make the MiGs and Sukhois compatible with JDAM-ERs.

Squadrons would program target coordinates into the JDAMs before a sortie. But the bomb still needs to know where it is, and how fast it’s traveling, in the instant it drops. That’s the data that passes through the Mil-Std-1760C bus.

As a bonus, the same bus should make Ukrainian jets compatible with other NATO-style smart munitions. So Ukraine’s JDAM-ERs, arcing down on Russian forces from 50 miles away, might be just the start of an expanding campaign of precision bombing starting this summer.