BGM-109G Gryphon Cruise missile (United States)
Channel: Main Battle Tank
Date: 2023-01-21

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The BGM-109G Gryphon was a cruise missile operated by the US Air Force (USAF) during the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was essentially a ground-launched BGM-109A Tomahawk, and was also designated as the Ground Launched Cruise Missile (GLCM), sometimes awkwardly referred-to as "Glickum". Fortunately, the Gryphon has never been launched in anger, nor with a live nuclear warhead.

   The Gryphon is the product of the GLCM program, initiated by the USAF in 1971 as an effort to develop a replacement for the obsolete MGM-13 Mace cruise missile. The new weapon envisioned would be able to carry a nuclear warhead out to a range exceeding 2 000 km, using an economical small turbofan engine and Terrain Contour Matching (TERCOM) guidance. Development work moved slowly over the next several years, likely owing to a strong institutional bias against cruise missiles in the USAF (see the pages on the Tomahawk and the AGM-86A ALCM for further context), but matters changed quickly in 1976, with the entry of the RSD-10 Pioneer (Western designation SS-20 Saber) Intermediate-Range Ballistic Missile (IRBM) into service with the Soviet forces in Europe. The Pioneer missile represented a serious complication for NATO's nuclear strategy, as it allowed Soviet forces to rapidly strike any NATO military installation in Europe using road-mobile launchers, from the relative safety of rear areas inside the Soviet Union. Under intense political pressure from West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt in January of 1977, the US government in turn committed itself to counter to the new IRBM threat.

   Though behind the scenes, these events were driven by political intrigue that had very little to do with NATO defense. This wasn't Chancellor Schmidt's "first rodeo" with the US government in this capacity, as he had just prior agreed to purchase the E-3 Sentry airborne early warning aircraft (whose purpose at that time was to be an early warning system for Soviet IRBM launches, not as an airborne C3I system) for the Luftwaffe, only if the US government had committed itself to arming the M1 Abrams tank with a 120 mm gun using the same ammunition as the Leopard 2 tank (which ultimately resulted in the creation of the M1A1 Abrams).

   Military politics were involved as well. The USAF until this time saw the US Navy's Sea Launched Cruise Missile (SLCM), which became the BGM-109 Tomahawk) program only as unwanted competition for their share of the nuclear budget, and preferred to have the AGM-86 for the ALCM program then in development. However, the SLCM was the only mature surface-launchable cruise missile available to meet the GLCM requirement. The GLCM was also part of a bureaucratic turf war with the US Army, over who would control the land-based intermediate-range nuclear arena, with the Army's competing weapon being the MGM-31C Pershing 2 IRBM. While the USAF in the GLCM offered Congress a weapon that was promised to slip nuclear warheads under the enemy's radar and air defenses, the Army's Pershing 2 was claimed to be so fast the enemy wouldn't have time to react before it hit them. Neither faction ended up overthrowing the other as intended in this arena, as Congress ultimately decided to buy several-hundred of each weapon.

   An even deeper layer of intrigue was an ongoing series of negotiations between the US and the USSR over the possibility of eliminating all of both nation's land-based intermediate-range nuclear warhead delivery systems. Dubbed the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) talks, this dialogue had taken place since mid-1979, and offered a "Zero Option" that --- if taken by both sides --- would significantly ease tensions between East and West, and also eliminate the intractable problem of how to counter and fend-off the IRBM threat. However, the West was deeply divided over whether or not to deploy new intermediate-range nuclear weapons before an INF Treaty could be created. The "Hawks" on the matter insisted that no matter what the outcome of the negotiations, the US military had to show its commitment to NATO and its resolve by deploying the GLCM and Pershing 2 first, while the "Doves" countered that doing so might provoke the USSR into abandoning the INF talks, and that if they don't, the new weapons would have to be retired and destroyed within a few years (or possibly months) of finally being deployed. As the talks continued, so did the development of the GLCM and the Pershing 2.