Striking From a Distance: American Air-Launched Guided Weapons from the Walleye to the StormBreaker

The Walleye was a television-guided glide bomb with no engine, steering itself onto its target during an unpowered descent. It entered service with the Navy and Air Force in 1967, one of the earliest precision guided munitions, and it could carry a conventional warhead or, in later variants, a W72 nuclear warhead.

The Maverick replaced the Walleye by adding a rocket motor, which made it a missile rather than a glide bomb. It entered Air Force service in August 1972 as a close air support weapon, later gained laser and imaging infrared guidance, and was exported to more than thirty countries.

Introduced in 1975, the GBU-15 bolts a guidance kit onto a Mark 84 or BLU-109 bomb. A data link lets the launching aircraft steer it by television or imaging infrared. In the 1991 Gulf War all 71 rounds dropped came from F-111F aircraft.

The ALCM let B-52G and B-52H bombers launch from a great distance and saturate enemy air defenses with many small, low-flying targets. It entered service in 1982, and the Soviet Union answered with new countermeasures including airborne early warning aircraft and the Tor missile system.

The JSOW is an unpowered glide bomb that uses GPS and inertial navigation to reach defended targets from outside air defense range, and it can dispense submunitions in a linear pattern. It entered operational service in January 1999 with the Navy and Marine Corps.

The JASSM is a low-detection cruise missile with a 1,000-pound armor-piercing warhead, in Air Force service since 2009. The extended-range JASSM-ER followed in 2014, and Australia, Finland and Poland have since bought it.

The LRASM is the anti-ship derivative of the JASSM and became operational in 2018. With a range of about 200 nautical miles, it can find and engage targets on its own, without prior precision intelligence, using GPS, inertial navigation, imaging infrared and passive radar.

The StormBreaker, once called the Small Diameter Bomb II, is a glide bomb of about 204 pounds that can strike moving or stationary targets up to 60 nautical miles away. Its radar, laser, infrared and GPS guidance lets it find targets through weather, and it entered service in September 2020.