mia,” Gelinas said. “The purpose of this study is to
determine a preferred material concept that can defeat
a near-peer surface action group. The study team is
looking at concepts that could [reach] IOC [initial
operational capability] between 2018 and 2024.”
“Once the AOA is approved by the Navy, it will be
submitted to [director of the Office of the Secretary of
Defense for Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation]
for a sufficiency review before being considered as part
of the acquisition process,” said Lt. Courtney Hillson,
a Navy spokeswoman in the Office of the Chief of
Information.
Gelinas said this concept would be a replacement to
the current Harpoon Block IC, scheduled for retirement by 2025.
In addition to a Harpoon replacement, the Navy is
looking at a next-generation missile with a longer
reach. Though the Navy has been able to attack fixed
land targets with Raytheon-built BGM-109 Tactical
Tomahawk (Block IV) cruise missiles at ranges of 900
nautical miles, it lacks a ship-launched cruise missile
to make precision anti-ship attacks at such ranges.
To meet that need, DARPA is spearheading with the
Navy the development of a new missile, the Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM).
“The LRASM program was initiated in 2009 in coordination with the Navy leadership to ensure that the
U.S. maintained best-in-world operational anti-surface
warfare capability into the future,” said Rob McHenry,
DARPA’s LRASM program manager. “The end goal of
the program is to demonstrate and mature the technologies so they may be transferred to the services for
the development of a production variant.
“The LRASM program is aimed at developing
advanced prototype capabilities for anti-access/area
denial,” he said. “This requires technological advancement of advanced sensors, dynamic control systems,
survivability features and weapon lethality. These technologies are being integrated into complete prototypes
that should be capable of completing challenging long-range strikes against high-end air defense targets in
hostile environments.
“LRASM must traverse long ranges, sufficient to
allow U.S. Navy platforms to engage from outside of
direct counterfire ranges,” he said. “LRASM must
employ organic sensors to search out large target areas
with many interfering ships, and to detect and identify
targets of interest to a very high certainty. LRASM must
then employ a range of survivability features to pene-
trate through the defensive systems designed to shoot
it down. Finally, LRASM must deliver sufficient lethal-
ity to sink the target and make it worth the trip.”
DARPA selected two distinctly different designs from
nine submissions for Phase 1 development of LRASM.
U.S. NAVY
The guided-missile destroyer USS Mitscher launches a Harpoon anti-ship missile at the ex-USNS Saturn during a sinking
exercise in the Atlantic Ocean Oct. 27, 2010. Mitscher and
other ships assigned to the George H. W. Bush Carrier Strike
Group fired live ammunition at Saturn. The Navy is studying
alternatives for a Harpoon replacement. The missile has
been in service for more than 30 years.
“Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control-Strike
Weapons [Orlando, Fla.], received a $9.91 million con-
tract in July 2009 for LRASM-A: a ‘low-slow’ weapon
that uses stealth, trajectory and advanced avionics to
achieve high survivability against modern air defense
systems,” McHenry said. “Lockheed Martin Missiles and
Fire Control-Tactical Missiles [Grand Prairie, Texas]
received a $9.99 million contract in July 2009 for
LRASM-B: a ‘high-fast’ weapon that uses speed, stealth
and maneuver to achieve its survivability.”
LRASM-A is a derivative of the AGM-158B Joint
Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile-Extended Range
(JASSM-ER), a development of the AGM-158A JASSM
in service as an air-launched cruise missile with the
U.S. Air Force and three foreign air forces. The Navy
originally was a participant in the JASSM program but
withdrew in favor of the Boeing-built AGM-84K
Standoff Land-Attack Missile-Extended Range. The
LRASM-A is a subsonic winged missile powered by a
turbojet engine, equipped with a multimode seeker
and armed with a 1,000-pound-class penetrating
blast-fragmentation warhead.
“LRASM-A is designed to be the ideal invisible
cruise missile, with a goal of denying the target any cue
that it has been fired on until the warhead detonates,”
McHenry said. “[It] offers an ideal combination of cost
effectiveness and low technical risk due to commonality with the ongoing JASSM-ER program, while using
new, cutting-edge technologies to meet or exceed the
challenging LRASM requirements.”
