The next Harpoon? the missile, that is

From Aviation Week's ARES Blog

DARPA/ONR Launch Long-range Anti-ship Missile Demonstrator

Posted by Graham Warwick at 6/17/2008 9:05 AM CDT

After years of neglect, the US is looking to get back into the anti-ship missile business. DARPA and the Office of Naval Research have kicked off a joint effort "to rapidly demonstrate a ship-launched standoff anti-ship strike weapon". The Long Range Anti-Ship Missile Demonstration program aims to flight test a prototype within three years of contract award.

The problem is the US doesn't have a long-range anti-ship missile - and the countries it considers potential enemies do. Boeing's Harpoon is subsonic and can fly about 60nm from a surface launch. Russia's 3M-54E Klub (SS-N-27 Sizzler) can reach out as far as 160nm, and some variants are supersonic. China has Sizzler, and it may have been offered to Iran.

Sizzler is not a new threat, so why now? "Because we don't have one," says a US industry official. "Their ships can shoot at ours from outside the range of our missiles." But what's so "DARPA-hard" about developing a long-range anti-ship missile that the research agency needs to do it?

The performance requirements for the demonstrator are classified. DARPA's broad-area announcement uses phrases such as "significant standoff ranges" and "well outside direct counter-fire ranges", as well as "inherent capability to ensure weapon survivability against advanced defensive systems" and the "extensibility of terminal systems to future delivery vehicles with enhanced range, speed, or launch platform flexibility".

The missile is to be fired from the US Navy's Mk41 vertical launch system, receiving in-flight targeting updates, navigating with degraded or denied GPS, using multiple sensors for target discrimination, varying the terminal approach trajectory, sending target classification data back before impact for damage assessment, and disabling the ship with unitary or multiple warheads.

DARPA and/or ONR will fund the demonstration. The nine-month first phase of the program will take the missile concepts to a preliminary design review. Phase 2 will take the selected system to a full-scale, integrated flight demonstration of the vehicle's performance, target discrimination, terminal survivability and warhead lethality - all within 36 months of contract award.