Forum: F-16 Armament & Stores

Remember you don't gain success without failure, you learn from it and press forward...we never would have reached the Moon if we stopped at the first failure or loss of life.

perhaps you could ask for clarification.

What and who are you talking about? How about some elaboration and clarification?

The whole purpose of my posts was to offer an explanation about why some defense contractors could produce substandard programs or systems without resorting to attacking the competency and integrity of the individuals who work in those companies, as Idelsof was doing. I did this by suggesting that companies do not necessarily have as their aim the best interests of their customers or the country but simply their fiscal bottom line.

You state that companies are made of their employees but this is not necessarily so

U.S. industry: Viable alternatives exist if Pentagon axes JASSM cruise missile
Michael Sirak, Defense Daily - 06/28/2007

Raytheon [RTN] could offer an air-launched variant of its Tomahawk cruise missile or a powered, extended-range version of its Joint Standoff Weapon (JSOW) if the Pentagon's top weapons buyer opts to terminate the Air Force's JASSM cruise missile, a senior company official said last week.

Further, Boeing [BA] could present variants of its Standoff Land Attack Missile-Expanded Response (SLAM-ER) to address capability gaps left by axing the JASSM, the head of the company's defense research and development, said during a conversation with Defense Daily at last week's Paris Air Show.

Yesterday afternoon, the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) hosted a review to discuss the future of the JASSM, which Lockheed Martin [LMT] builds. At press time on June 27, the results of the review were not known.
The stealthy JASSM, which stands for Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile, is in the crosshairs of the Pentagon's weapon buyers because of a spate of performance anomalies in recent flight tests. The test failures came right when OSD was preparing to certify to the Congress, per U.S. law, that the missile project warrants continuation despite significant growth in its overall projected cost, some of which is not related to the missile's performance.

Pentagon acquisition czar Kenneth Krieg has said he wants a comprehensive plan in place to improve the missile system's reliability before he will go to Congress and make the case for continuing the program (Defense Daily, June 7). The JASSM system has functioned successfully about 60 percent of the time in 64 flight tests to date.

The Air Force wants reliability rates of 75 percent. Lockheed Martin has said it is committed to working with the Air Force and OSD to resolve the performance issues (Defense Daily, June 19).

In the extreme case that Krieg does cancel the JASSM program, the Air Force would be in need of new missiles to fill the void. It has 600 JASSMs already in its inventory, but planned to buy about 4,300 more, both in baseline and extended-range configurations with ranges, respectively, of greater than 200 nautical miles and about 500 nautical miles.

For Raytheon, either an air-launched derivative of the Navy's Tomahawk Block IV cruise missile with a range of 1,000 nautical miles or a powered version of its JSOW glide weapon could come into play, said Fred Anding, the company's director of JSOW international programs. He has also been involved with the Tomahawk since 1975.

Already, the company has provided information on an air-launched Tomahawk at the request of the Navy office that oversees the Tomahawk program, Anding told Defense Daily last week during an interview at the Paris Air Show.

The Navy's Tomahawks are fitted with a booster for launch from submarines and surface ships to propel the missile until its engine starts, but the idea of an air-launched Tomahawk is not new, he said.

Indeed, during the missile's development in the mid 1970s, boosterless Tomahawks were launched from Navy A-6 Intruder attack planes in flight tests off the coast of Hawaii, he said. And during the competition for the Air Force's long-range, nuclear-armed cruise missile, which Boeing eventually won in 1980 with its AGM-86B Air Launched Cruise Missile, air-launched Tomahawk missiles flew 10 times from a B-52 bomber aircraft, he said.

In fact, Tomahawk missiles prior to the most recent Block IV model retained the lugs for carriage on aircraft, Anding said.

"But the shape of the missile, the length of the missile, the outer mold line, all that stayed the same as the ones that we air launched," he said. "If you wanted to air launch it now, you would have to put the lugs back on, get rid of the booster and you would be good to go" with some software changes.
The missile, with attributes like angled wings and a chine nose, has "good low-observable characteristics," he said.

The extended-range, powered JSOW, or JSOW-ER, is a company-funded concept that has already attracted international interest in places like Australia, Anding said. Raytheon conducted a static test of the powered system in December 2006 and is hoping to gain Pentagon or international sponsorship to continue developing the derivative, he said. With sponsorship, he said he thinks the ER variant could be available for combat in 2012, sooner if it is deemed a higher priority and receives additional funding support. [Recently House defense authorizers added $3 million to the Navy's budget in FY'08 to support testing of the JSOW-ER.]

With a projected reach of up to nearly 300 nautical miles, the JSOW-ER has more than four times the range of unpowered JSOWs, which can glide for up to nearly 70 nautical miles upon release from their host aircraft.

Anding said Raytheon actually flew a powered JSOW model in the mid 1990s when it competed in the U.K.'s Conventionally Armed Stand Off Missile competition in which MBDA's Storm Shadow cruise missile prevailed. The new powered model under development uses the same engine that Raytheon is using in the Miniature Air Launched Decoy that it is building for the Air Force and fits easily within the weapon since the unpowered JSOWs always had room in their back end for a propulsion system.

"From an aircraft integration perspective, there is no change in the mold lines," Anding said of the JSOW-ER. "The mass properties are maintained. The launch sequence is not changed...That reduces your integration risk."

JSOW-ER would be both a capable and affordable option, he said.

Indeed JSOWs carrying the Broach penetrating warhead can defeat targets protected by up to five feet of reinforced concrete, he said. This is maybe not as powerful as the JASSM in this regard, but still potent for many types of targets. Further, these Broach-carrying JSOWs have demonstrated an impressive circular error probable of only four feet in multiple flight tests to date, he said.

Raytheon estimates the cost of the JSOW-ER at between $350,000 and $400,000 in current year dollars, Anding said.

The company is already under contract with the Navy to add a datalink to the Broach-carrying JSOW model so that the weapon can attack maritime targets and eventually moving objects on land. This new feature is planned to be available for combat in FY '10, and could be part of the JSOW-ER, Anding said.

George Muellner, president of Advanced Systems within Boeing Integrated Defense Systems, said Boeing has SLAM-ER derivatives that it could offer the Air Force.

"We clearly have SLAM-ER versions that we would throw back into the fray," he said during an interview on June 19 in Paris, noting that the SLAM-ER lost out originally to the JASSM in 1998 in the Air Force's then-missile competition.
In terms of survivability, the SLAM-ER version that Boeing proposed back then, had "very similar characteristics" to JASSM, Muellner said.

To his knowledge, no one from the Pentagon has asked the company for information yet on missile options that could fill in for the JASSM now, he said. Nor has the company submitted any unsolicited proposal, he said. "We will wait for our customer to make the first move there," he said.

However, Boeing did tell the Air Force that it is prepared to assist Lockheed Martin in resolving the anomaly that the JASSM has been experiencing with its Global Positioning System-based navigation, Muellner said.

"We would be glad to do that," he said. "We have been fortunate.

We haven't seen those types of problems with what we have on [the Small Diameter Bomb] or, for that matter, [the Joint Direct Attack Munition].

But then again we have a different system, per se."