The US Marines are buying three additional Harvest HAWK weapons kits for their fleet of KC-130J Hercules--basically turning the tactical tanker/transports into gunships and surveillance platforms. It's kind of a demonstration of just how versatile the Herk really is...
The KC-130J is proving to be the aircraft of choice for
modification into gunships and other special operations applications. The MC-130J
and forthcoming AC-130J aren't based on the vanilla C-130J, but rather the
Marines' tanker variant airframe. But the special operations aircraft have a
sensor ball added along with an aerial refueling receptacle... which weren't part
of the Marines' requirements. The special ops birds also have provisions for
some other special hardware...
The only weakness of the KC-130J is that the Marines didn't spring for the enhanced cargo handling system found on the regular J-model, opting instead for the cheaper original system found on the legacy Hercules. Probably, in retrospect, it might have been wiser to have just kept the new system.
The USAF special ops Herks, however, do have the new cargo-handling system...
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