About a week or two ago news broke in the media that the much anticipated yet delayed Ground Launch Small Diameter Bomb (GLSDB) has not performed well in Ukraine to the extent that the Ukrainians have tossed it aside. This news got more play because none other than Dr. William LaPlante, the U.S. Undersecretary for Defense Acquisition and Sustainment made a cryptic and opaque statement about just such a system(at 58:23 in the video below), even though he did not specifically name the GLSDB. But given The Boeing Company’s recent woes, people were quick to point fingers at the Boeing-Saab joint development GLSDB munition.
But it turns out that the Russians have of late been able to efficiently and cheaply use electronic counter measures to jam several other high-end and more expensive systems supplied to Ukraine by the U.S. including the previously much lauded Excalibur artillery shell. From an article by the “Business Insider”:
In March, Daniel Patt, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, told Congress the GPS-guided Excalibur artillery shells "had a 70% efficiency rate hitting targets when first used in Ukraine" but that "after six weeks, efficiency declined to only 6% as the Russians adapted their electronic-warfare systems to counter it."
www.businessinsider.com/…
There have been whispers that until recent work arounds, even the previously acclaimed “wonder weapons” HIMARS and ATACMS also had issues with Russian jamming. And therein lies the Pentagon procurement intrigue as to why the GLSDB was the one publicly thrown under the bus. First off, the GLSDB is cheap compared to many other Pentagon gee whiz systems. It is essentially a GBU-39 GPS-guided precision aerial bomb, which costs relatively little. The US has a huge stockpile of these. It is mounted on top of an obsolete M26 rocket's booster that is being phased out of service making it cheaper still.
But we all know that in practice the Pentagon does not do cheap and unsexy weapon systems. Unfortunately for the GLSDB, it is both. On top of that it is not in the inventory of any of the US service branches. The GLSDB therefore has very few champions in its own homeland. Which also explains why Boeing had to go get help from Saab to defray the development costs as the Pentagon was never interested in the GLSDB in the first place and didn’t put any skin in the game.
But it turns out that the Ukrainians have no such qualms about the GLSDB. As is their way, they have come up with fixes to the jamming problem and are getting jiggy blowing up Russian thingies with the GLSDB. See the video from “Reporting From Ukraine” of May 4, 2024 showing the use of the GLSDB in the battle for Krinky on the East bank of the Dnipro(at 1:30 in the video below). Yeah, the Ukrainians are still there and even slowly expanding that bridgehead. And the GLSDB be there, too.