The General Electric AN/TPQ-1O Course Directing Central was a light-weight, two-unit, helicopter transportable, ground based bombing system developed for use by the United States Marine Corps to provide highly accurate, day/night all weather close air support.

The AN/TPQ-10 saw extensive use during the Vietnam War supporting Marine Forces in the I Corps Tactical Zone from 1965 through 1971, most famously to great effect during the Battle of Khe Sanh in early 1968.

[1] It remained a mainstay of Marine Corps close air support tactics until it was phased out of the inventory in the early 1990s after the Gulf War.

These early attempts proved unsuccessful; however, the seeds of ground based radar control of close air support were planted.

To do this, they designed a small computer that could be carried ashore from a ship and a device that allowed the automatic pilot in an F4U Corsair to accept radio commands from the ground based control system as if it were coming from the plane itself.

It was during this testing that Major Dalby and his Marines realized that the technology that they developed would have a much more practical application guiding close air support aircraft onto targets.

Years later, Krulak devoted an entire chapter in his book ‘’First to Fight: An Inside View of the U.S. Marine Corps’’ to the development of this radar by Dalby and his team.

A contract was signed with General Electric to develop a system similar in function to the AN/MPQ-14A but having longer range, multiple target capability, greater versatility, better transportability, and less weight.