At the time, the service planned to downselect to a single vendor in FY22 during the EMD period. The Pentagon’s fiscal 2022 budget requests full funding for the military’s nuclear modernization priorities, including $609 million for the LRSO program. That money ensures efforts like LRSO, the B-21 bomber and the Columbia-class submarine proceed, even as the department studies whether to make changes to the nuclear enterprise. The Air Force could buy more than 1,000 LRSO missiles, which are projected to have a range in excess of 1,500 miles. In 1996, 1997 and 2001, 200 additional CALCMs were produced from excess ALCMs. These missiles, designated Block I, incorporate improvements such as a larger and improved conventional payload (3,000 pound blast class), a multi-channel GPS receiver and integration of the buffer box into the GPS receiver.
US Air Force “Loads & Fires” Nuclear Capable AGM-86 Cruise Missiles From B-52s Amid Global Tensions - EurAsian Times
US Air Force “Loads & Fires” Nuclear Capable AGM-86 Cruise Missiles From B-52s Amid Global Tensions.
Posted: Tue, 16 Apr 2024 16:50:29 GMT [source]
ALCM
The SAL seeker allows a human operator to “paint” a target for the missile using a laser. The seeker locks on to the laser’s reflected electromagnetic energy and flies itself to the target. Having these multiple seekers builds in mission flexibility, allowing the Spear 3 to be fired as an autonomous fire-and-forget missile or a laser-guided missile. In 2017, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin each received a contract worth about $900 million for the 54-month technology maturation and risk reduction phase of the LRSO program.
Use by Ukraine
The system was otherwise similar to Quail, using a simple inertial navigation system (INS) allowing the missile to fly a pre-programmed course. This led to the adoption of low-level attacks, where the bombers would fly below the radar horizon so they could not be seen on ground-based radars. Quail, originally designed for the high-altitude mission, was modified with the addition of a barometric altimeter to allow it to fly at lower altitudes.
AGM-158 JASSM
The origin of the Soumar appears to be from the nuclear capable Russian Kh-55. In 2005, Ukraine acknowledged that 12 Kh-55’s (without nuclear warheads) were illegally sold to Iran in 2001 through a black market counterfeit operation. As well as the Storm Shadows, which are precision-guided cruise missiles with a firing range in excess of 250 kilometers (155 miles), Britain is also sending more than 1,600 strike and air defense missiles, Sunak’s office said. The package amounts to £500 million ($620 million) of new spending, taking total UK military aid to Ukraine this financial year to £3 billion.
To achieve the extra range, conformal fuel tanks are mounted on both sides of the fuselage. The Navy’s ask that MACE be able to carry a variety of interchangeable payloads and seekers points to multiple applications as well. A baseline payload of 75 pounds suggests MACE would have a smaller warhead and less punch than a Harpoon but if the weapon can scale payloads, it could have more kinetic yield. With an eye to its potential cost and quantity, I asked if the Navy might consider MACE as an anti-ship munition as part of the magazine of future unmanned surface vessels like those now forming the Navy’s USV Division 1.
Future of the ALCM
Lockheed Martin was even reported to be working to integrate the LRASM on Boeing’s P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft. There is ample precedent for fitting a long range anti-ship missile to such an aircraft. The air-launched version of the Harpoon was first deployed on the Navy's P-3C Orion in 1979. AGM-86B missiles can be air-launched in large numbers by the bomber force.
Acquisition News
The Selective Precision Effects At Range Capability 3 (Spear 3) missile is a member of the Brimstone family of cruise missiles. The land-attack and antiship air-launched cruise missile is designed to be internally carried by the F-35B Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter aircraft. Currently in development, the missile is scheduled to enter service in the mid-2020s. An air-launched cruise missile (ALCM) is a cruise missile that is launched from a military aircraft.
These missiles are about the same size and weight and fly at similar speeds to the above category. In 2000, reports suggest that Ukraine exported six Kh-55SM missiles to China, and in 2001, exported another six to Iran. Another ballistic missile appeared to have been aimed at a radar site in northern Israel, but it missed its target, the U.S. officials told Martin. "This base is operating around the clock, it functioned during Operation 'Iron Shield' and today as well, from this base, aircraft took off to protect the skies of the State of Israel." It’s not for no reason that the Air Force is trying to pack more JASSMs on its F-15s. "Despite the palletized-munitions program being relatively new, it’s moving very quickly,” said Scott Callaway, Lockheed Martin director of advanced strike systems.
ALCM Development
Plans call for fielding the nuclear missile by the late 2020s, possibly followed by a conventional derivative thereafter. The service on July 1 awarded Raytheon a cost-plus-fixed-fee deal for the engineering and manufacturing development stage of the LRSO program, with contract options that max out at about $2 billion. This eliminated the need for ALCM to fit in the B-1's bomb bay, and the length limitations that implied. The Air Force decided to cancel production of the A-model ALCM, and replace it with either an air-launched version of the SLCM, or the ERV. The ERV flew in August 1979, and was declared the winner of the head-to-head fly-off against the SLCM in March 1980.
CALCM was operationally employed for the first time in Desert Storm and widely used in subsequent operations. CALCM was capable of adverse weather, day/ night, air-to-surface, accurate, standoff strike capability at ranges greater than 500 miles. The AGM-86D was CALCM’s Block II penetrator version with AUP-3(M) warhead used for standoff strikes on hardened, deeply buried targets in Afghanistan.
Between 1957 and 1961 the United States followed an ambitious and well-funded program to develop a nuclear-powered cruise missile, Supersonic Low Altitude Missile (SLAM). It was designed to fly below the enemy's radar at speeds above Mach 3 and carry hydrogen bombs that it would drop along its path over enemy territory. Although the concept was proven sound and the 500-megawatt engine finished a successful test run in 1961, no airworthy device was ever completed. Modern cruise missiles are capable of traveling at high subsonic, supersonic, or hypersonic speeds, are self-navigating, and are able to fly on a non-ballistic, extremely low-altitude trajectory. On March 8, 2015, Iran unveiled the Soumar ground-launched cruise missile.
Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer USS Fitzgerald (DDG 62) conducts a live fire of a ... The RFI indicates that the missiles will need to be compatible with external carriage on the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet as the “threshold platform”. They’ll need to fit with internal and external carriage options for the F-35A/C as well.
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