New Seeker Could Put Tomahawk In Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile Race
Aviation Week & Space Technology
Tony Osborne
Wed, 2014-11-12 04:00
Raytheon is funding a seeker upgrade to the Tomahawk missile to extend its life into the 2030s
Thirty years since the first iterations entered service, the Tomahawk cruise missile remains one of the key elements in the U.S. Navy’s long-range attack capability.
Nearly 50 of the missiles were recently fired against Islamic State militants and other terror groups during the early airstrikes in Syria as part of what is now known as Operation Inherent Resolve, and the weapon has been used as the opening shot in many of the major military operations since Desert Storm in 1991. It is often used to hit strategically important targets.
But Raytheon wants to further boost the weapon’s tactical capabilities to ready it for a possible contest to meet the U.S. Navy’s Offensive Anti-Surface Warfare requirement.
The company is spending $40 million of its own cash to improve the moving target and discrimination systems on the Block IV model weapon that entered service with the U.S. Navy in 2004. In 2008, the U.K. Royal Navy adopted the torpedo-tube-fired version.
Recent trials vetted a new-design passive seeker that detects radiation emitters. This was flown in April on an adapted T-39 Sabreliner business jet testbed equipped with the nose of a Tomahawk fitted to the front of the aircraft. The passive seeker will give the weapon electronic support measures, including listening for particular radar types and helping to steer the weapon away from benign civilian radars that monitor weather.
Next spring, the company will test a millimeter-wave, active seeker combined with a new high-speed processor, which will allow the weapon to image the target to confirm it is the correct one before entering terminal attack maneuvers. The company wants to achieve a technology readiness level of 6 on the seeker before captive-carry flights next summer.
“Our strategy was to have one missile doing all missions, explained Roy Donelson, program director for Tomahawk at Raytheon, speaking at the London Science Museum on Oct. 27.
“Tomahawk is already capable of dealing with mobile and fixed targets [and now] we can provide better target discrimination, better capability against moving targets with the seeker.”
Currently, the only way for Tomahawk to hit mobile targets is by using the Block IV’s ability to deliver new GPS coordinates of the target to the weapon through its data link. The three Cruise Missile Support Activity sites at Norfolk Virginia, Hawaii and Northwood, U.K., responsible for planning Tomahawk missions, are able to rapidly pass updated target position information in the final moments—the end game—of the missile’s flight. This provides the weapons with the potential for long-range anti-ship strike, as well as the ability to handle significant mobile targets on land.
It has been more than a decade since the Navy ditched the Tomahawk Anti-Ship Missile, a version of the weapon fitted with inertial guidance and the seeker head from the Boeing Harpoon anti-ship missile. Raytheon says one concern with that version was its inability to clearly discriminate between targets, especially from a long distance.
Donelson believes the weapon could be ideal for any future long-range anti-ship requirement because of the new seeker, but specifications for a potential Increment II Offensive Anti-Surface Warfare competition are not yet available.
The company has also proved that the weapon could perform battle-damage-assessment missions by relaying images via a data link as it passes over previously attacked targets on the way to its own, and it has also completed a series of high- and medium-altitude flights. The ability to take out concrete-reinforced structures may also be introduced through the use of the Joint Multiple Effects Warhead System (JMEWS), originally tested in 2010. Donelson says an engineering, manufacturing, and development contract for JMEWS could emerge in 2016.
The company hopes the Navy will keep the weapon in production until at least 2019 when early batches of the Block IV missile will need to be recertified and upgraded for another 15 years of life. The fiscal 2015 budget calls for production of around 100 missiles, but $82 million more maybe added to allow for another 96 missiles to be purchased.
A version of this article appears in the November 3/10 issue of Aviation Week & Space Technology.
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