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380AEW Article

Ammo tour highlights hard work

  • Published
  • By Senior Airman Jacob Morgan
  • 380th Air Expeditionary Wing Public Affairs
SOUTHWEST ASIA --  Base leadership and operations group Airmen from the 380th Air Expeditionary Wing took a tour of the temporary munitions storage area July 15 here that culminated in building a bomb.

The tour was hosted by the 380th Expeditionary Maintenance Squadron munitions flight, which builds, maintains and tests all munitions stored here. The purpose of the event was to highlight the hard work of the munitions Airmen and provide further familiarity of the air-to-air and air-to-surface munitions to the pilots who may need to deploy them.

"Ammo does a great job. Without munitions, aircrew wouldn't be able to accomplish the mission. Ammo can be tasked to build and provide reliable munitions on short notice and need to be able to build whatever munitions are necessary for the particular mission or target" said Capt. Jonah Brown, 380th Expeditionary Operations Support Squadron mission planning cell chief and air to air weapons and tactics chief. "Since my airframe is strictly an air-to-air platform, it was a learning experience for me to see the air-to-ground munitions pieces. We all got to witness the hard work that Ammo puts in to build up munitions when we task them with something."

The day started with a tour of one of the many munitions areas here. The visitors saw munitions such as a MK-84 bomb with different guidance systems, bombs designed for low collateral damage, bombs designed to penetrate the ground and missiles designed for air-to-air with heat seeking capabilities.

Each munitions item had a technical expert assigned to it. The expert gave a short overview of their specific munitions item and then answered questions regarding different systems on the munitions item or how it performs. For example, some munitions items have fuzes with higher delay than others to give the pilot time to be at a safe distance before detonation.

Most bombs and missiles are made up of three major parts: the explosives surrounded by a casing, a fuze and a guidance system.

"We have so many different types of missions we could fly from here. We need to meet the requirements of every possible mission," said Staff Sgt. Brandie Brown, 380th EMXS munitions flight conventional maintenance crew chief and Susanville, Calif., native deployed from Mountain Home Air Force Base, Idaho. "It's also important for the guys who use our munitions to have a better knowledge of our processes, so they know what it takes when they ask us to build or provide bombs or missiles."

After the tour, Brig. Gen. Kevin Schneider, 380th AEW commander and Chief Master Sgt. Garth Meade, 380th AEW command chief, were taught how to build a guided bomb unit 31 version three, commonly called GBU-31v3.

After safely inspecting the tail fuze, the commander and command chief used arming wire to pull the fuze wire through the bomb and locked it into place. Next, they attached the hardback assembly, which is designed to minimize the space between the weapon launch system and the bomb body. The last step was attaching the guidance system to the back end of the bomb. This process can be accomplished 12 times in under an hour, or one every five minutes, by the members of the 380th EMXS.

"It's not like pilots don't already know about these bombs and missiles," said Brandie Brown. "We wanted to broaden their scope and extend their knowledge, if they learned anything then this was a success."