The TOBS air vehicle slips out of its common launch tube and starts to autonomously fly towards the team’s location.

… The operations airborne mission commander presses the illuminated launch button. Webb continued: “Thousands of feet and miles away an orbiting AC-130J gunship receives the call. The commando “keys his radio and calmly states, ‘Send the TOBS.’” The team leader on the ground “knows that the cloud cover will make it difficult for traditional ISR to be of much use,” Webb told an audience at a recent conference in Washington, D.C. Brad Webb, the commander of AFSOC, described how the technology could be used during a hypothetical raid to capture a high-value terrorist target. TOBS “is addressing that capability gap.”

“We need to be able to track the enemy and we need to be able to engage the enemy whether there’s clouds, whether there’s any type of situation there that would prevent us from doing that,” he said. Jeffrey LaFleur, materiel leader for integrated strike programs at Special Operations Command, told National Defense. “We have a requirement for an all-weather capability on our gunships right now,” Air Force Lt. Tactical off-board sensing capabilities, also known as TOBS, would give AC-130 crews the ability to see the battlefield when their onboard sensor views are obscured. The program to develop the technology is approaching a key transition point. Air Force Special Operations Command wants to launch spy drones from its gunships to collect critical intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance information.

Would space force have a space gunship