The US Air Force has itself a new toy… a 2,000-pound GBU-31/B Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) bomb modified specifically to be a ship killer. In a video just released, one of these bombs, droppable by an F-35, whacked a cargo vessel and basically snapped it in half like a Twix. Whether it would do that to a proper armored combat vessel is less certain, though it’s pretty clear it wouldn’t do the ship any favors. The “Quicksink” bomb uses a combination of GPS and a nose-mounted radar seeker to control tail fins in order to put itself directly on target.
If you look closely (it helps to put the video on 0.25 playback speed) it looks like the bomb doesn’t actually hit the ship, but instead hits right next to it, going off kinda underneath the vessel. This creates a shock wave that pushed the middle of the vessel up, and creates a bubble under the vessel that doesn’t support it when it bends back down, thus Twixifying the ship. When the mist clears the vessel is already largely below the waves. Before the strike you can see what looks like a pretty healthy discharge of water near the rear of the ship, perhaps indicating that a bilge pump is working overtime to keep a leaky old vessel afloat. Possibly not the most representative demonstration of use against a modern military vessel, but for sinking crappy freighters, perhaps just the thing. European governments could make do with bombs like this in the Med and the Channel to deal with their ongoing seaborne invasions.
