USAF Hunter-Killer

Hunter-Killer is an unofficial project name based upon an Aviation Week & Space Technology article. The U.S. Air Force's Hunter-Killer program was a tactical unmanned combat air vehicles (UCAV) procurement program. The General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper, a variant of the MQ-1 Predator won the project and was deployed in Afghanistan.

This is the U.S. Air Force program for which several companies have developed vehicles.

Although the J-UCAS concept is a long way from the early idea of a "reusable cruise missile", that notion is apparently alive and well. In September 2003, an announcement was made that Lockheed Martin's "Skunk Works" was developing an air-launched UCAV named "the Minion". Details released describe it as having a launch weight of 3,400 kilograms (7,500 pounds) and able to carry a reconnaissance payload, a jammer system, a high-power microwave weapon, or four 100 kilogram (220 pound) GPS-guided small-diameter bombs. It could also be used as a decoy, though it would need to have radar-enhancement payload as it is described as extremely stealthy.

Range is given as up to 1,000 nautical miles (1,850 kilometers). Two would be carried into combat by a single strike fighter such as a Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor, with one under each wing, and launched from standoff distances to attack heavily defended targets. In practice, two strike fighters are expected to be used, launching four Minions, with the pilot of one aircraft watching out for threats while the other directs the UCAVs over a line-of-sight communications link. After the mission, the Minions would return to base and land conventionally on retractable landing gear.

A vague picture released with the announcement showed the Minion to have a certain broad resemblance to various air-launched cruise missiles, such as the Anglo-French Matra-BAe Dynamics APACHE / Storm Shadow or the US AGM-158A Joint Air to Surface Standoff Missile (JASSM), which is also built by Lockheed Martin and may have some degree of commonality with the Minion. The picture showed the Minion to have a spikelike, square-sided fuselage, with pop-out wings and twin tailfins, with the engine inlet just forward of the tailfins and the exhaust just behind the tailfins. Both the intake and the exhaust are shielded by triangular covers.

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