because they are more reliable and require no bottles of
cooling fluid onboard a ship, said J.R. Smith,
Raytheon’s business development manager for JAGM.
He said an uncooled seeker is more affordable and sim-plifies the logistics footprint of supporting JAGM.
The down-select decision for the JAGM is expected
later this year, with a contract award in early 2012. The
JAGM initially will be deployed on the F/A-18E/F
Super Hornet strike fighter, the MH-60R Seahawk helicopter and the AH-1Z helicopter gunship.
Although primarily a land-attack weapon, the
Raytheon-built GBU-53B Small-Diameter Bomb II
(SDB II) now in a $450 million engineering and manufacturing development phase for the F- 35 and the F/A-
18 “will have anti-ship capability and is designed to
find, fix, track, target, engage and assess small patrol
boats,” Chebi said.
The SDB II’s uncooled trimode seeker is the one proposed by the Raytheon/Boeing team for its JAGM entry.
Lockheed Martin’s cooled IR seeker was not selected
for SDB II, but in August the Air Force Research
Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio,
signed a five-year agreement with Lockheed Martin for
access to the seeker for future weapons applications,
St. John said.
