PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Hellfire Effectiveness
View Single Post
Old 10th September 2025 | 12:16
  #2 (permalink)  
Lonewolf_50
Community Builder
Community Influencer
 
Joined: Aug 2009
: Military
Posts: 9,346
Likes: 2,187
From: Texas
I saw your post in Jet Blast. Chasing UFO's hardly seems to be a military problem. What I gleaned from the youtube you shared is that its political stuff.

Using the Hellfire as an air to air weapon is an interesting wrinkle on that munition.

I know a little bit about Hellfire (albeit my experiences are a few decades old.)
It's an anti-tank weapon, meant (optimized) for air-to-ground attacks. In the US Navy, they modified the SH-60B (and now MH-60R) to carry and deploy the Hellfire as a lower cost anti boat/anti small ship weapon. It's original purpose was tank busting. The speed of the thing you had on the video in JB was quite a bit more than a boat or a tank. That might inform the difficulty in using Hellfire as an air to air weapon.

To make it an more effective air-to-air weapon, there would need to be a mod to the warhead so that something like a proximity fuse + HE/Blast Frag warhead is used rather than the anti-Tank / Anti-Boat warhead.
Granted, our Army and Navy have had a number of years to test out various mods to this Laser guided anti surface missile. I am not privy to any recent developments. (And there quite a few different mods to the missile).

When I was in the Middle East, Reaper had only recently come on line, but the Predator used the Laser guided Hellfires to very good effect on a wide variety of ground targets. At the time, we didn't have any TTP (Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures) for using Hellfire in an Air-to-Air mode.

There was apparently a development for a ground-to-air mode.
It has also been fielded on surface platforms in the surface-to-surface and surface-to-air roles. Interesting article about that here
Suggest you head over to the Wikipedia page for the AGM 114, it's a great treatment for that munition.

Last edited by Lonewolf_50; 10th September 2025 at 20:00.
Lonewolf_50 is offline  
Reply