Air Force (Air Force) The United States has completed the first phase of demonstration tests of the semi-autonomous precision weapons system Golden Horde ("Golden Horde"), for the first time hitting six bombs at once Collaborative Small Diameter Bomb (CSDB), reports Defense News.
The latest tests took place on May 26 at the White Sands missile range in New Mexico. During the test, the F-16 Fighting Falcon dropped six CSDB bombs, which exchanged data with each other and with the ground station. Thus, the first task of the tests was completed — establishing a connection between the bombs using the Banshee 2 network (in previous tests, four and two bombs interacted). As part of the second task, the CSDB swarm received updated information about the target from the ground station.
As a result, a pair of bombs simultaneously destroyed one target, and two more bombs hit a pair of different targets.
In March, the FlightGlobal portal wrote that in the penultimate week of February, during the joint use of four GBU-39/B SDB bombs integrated into the Golden Horde system, four targets were simultaneously successfully hit.
In June 2020, the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet first launched the GBU-53/B StormBreaker aerial bomb, which, as Forbes wrote, being integrated into the Golden Horde program, will change the "rules of the game".
In March of the same year, the US Air Force at the Air Warfare Symposium 2020 event in Orlando (Florida) showed an animation of a strike on the enemy of the promising Golden Horde system, which involves the use of artificial intelligence and communications.
Ivan Potapov
