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| U.S. Air Force Airmen from the 7th Munitions Squadron transport a Long Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM) toward a B-1 Bomber June 12, 2013, at Dyess Air Force Base, Texas. The weapon loading was part of a trial-run for munitions Airmen prior to the first captive carry test conducted by the 337th Test and Evaluation Squadron on June 17. (U.S. Air Force photo by Airman 1st Class Damon Kasberg/Released) |
The USAF is conducting a test of the LRASM onboard a B-1. But it occurs to me that this missile is obsolete before it even gets into service. Stats via Wikipedia.
| Long Range Anti-Ship Missile | |
|---|---|
| Type | Long-range anti-ship |
| Place of origin | United States |
| Service history | |
| In service | Planned to enter service in 2015 |
| Production history | |
| Manufacturer | Lockheed Martin |
| Specifications | |
| Warhead | 1,000 lb blast-fragmentation penetrator[2] |
| Operational range | 370 km (230 mi)+[1] |
| Launch platform | Mark 41 Vertical Launch System (VLS),F-35 Lightning II |
I'm sorry but a cruise missile flying at medium altitude to get to the target area and then dropping low to make a sea skimming final run seems ok in theory, but the range is what has me doubting.
Modern anti-air missiles (at least some of them) will be able to launch on the subsonic missile while its cruising at altitude. By definition it will be saturation attacks or expect mission failure. According to Wiki, there was a planned LRASM-B that was to be supersonic but it was canceled.
I just wonder.
Is this the type of weapon that will win in the Pacific or is it simply about the illusion of progress?
JASSM is supposedly VLO. So medium altitude may actually be safer.
ReplyDeleteThe longer your range is, the longer the transit time and the harder the targeting solution is - you've pretty much got to have something on the other end near the target, keeping track of it and feeding the data back to the shooter and the missile well over the horizon. Perhaps the Navy felt that investment in such a system (which would basically be required to use a very long range missile to its fullest extent) would be far too expensive, and add additional time to the development and deployment of the missile itself?
ReplyDeleteIt's called, "oh my god we need a missile and we don't have anything else". They should have taken Fasthawk to conclusion and deployed it but no, they wanted the next big thing, and (predictably) failed miserably. Fasthawk would have deserved the title "Game Changer". Hell they could have at least stuck with LRASM-B but even that was cancelled almost before the ink was dry.
ReplyDeleteI think that range is only stated as confirmed "over" 200nm. I have read in more than one place the estimate is just over 500nm range.
ReplyDeleteEither way we should also develop a warhead for a tomahawk making it a anti ship weapon. I would picture it as fired from distance in a general area with a UAV/SSN/etc.. making the final uplink to put the warhead in action. Navy surface ships will be at distance so being able to throw in on the surface strike, maybe letting the F-35's or future bomber hit the escort screen with the LRASM, while the tomohawks hit the transports and softer targets immediately after. Saturation air, sea, hell the evil wheel wishes some allies or Marines firing LRASM out of cargo containers using off site targeting.
The Asian naval battlefield is full of small islands. How many ways can you put a small detachment of marines and either a stationary cargo box or LVS truck on the numerous islands that straddle the Chicom supply lines. The way to defeat an enemy basing their whole game on multi million dollar medium range ballistic missiles is make more targets than they can hit, oh and those targets need to be cheep unpredictable and hard to target lock.
speed against stationary land targets is a plus but on moving targets its more about countering counter measures and sneaking as best possible.
According to the LRASM Wikipedia page, the range was reduced back to the pre-ER JASSM range with the addition of the anti-shipping seeker and other hardware changes.
DeleteTomahawk really doesn't need a separate warhead. It needs a new seeker/datalink for anti-shipping. It may also need some RCS reduction or some other way to ensure penetration of air defenses.
We don't know that the range was reduced to standard JASSM levels, we only no that it isn't as great as the JASSM-ER.
DeleteWe are hindered by the INF treaty we signed with the Soviets because it limits everything to from 300-3400 miles. And from what I've read, the Russians are just as leery of Chinese missiles as we are and want the INF to go away as the Cold War relic it is.
ReplyDeleteThe Chinese, never a signatory to INF, are free to develop DF-21s and CJ-10 (which has a range similar to the old BGM-109G Tomahawk we scrapped).
Perhaps the Navy is waiting until they have EM rail guns being deployed as their hypersonic anti-shipping weapon. Because if all they've done is re-create a LO version of a Harpoon, I'm not sure we are keeping pace with the Chinese.
Both the Taiwanese (Hsiung Feng III) and the Japanese (ASM-3) have supersonic weapons. We could always borrow a version of these for our own. It might have an interest mix as a potential adversary would need to worry about supersonic missile streak towards them as VLO cruise missile slowly hunt them down.
More importantly, if we ditch the INF and start developing long range cruise missiles so they can get far enough into Chinese territory, beyond the littoral, far enough to hit air bases and launch sites.
We should be developing cruise missiles with their own sub-munitions so that they can autonomously roam and scan for EM signals or launch signatures e.g. a VLO, long-range Tomahawk equivalent that can drop roam, scan and fire a JAGM, a GBU-44 Viper Strike or LOCAAS. Once it has expended all of its payload, it flies to the nearest target and dives down with its own integral unitary warhead.
And we should consider also announcing that the US would treat any MRBM fired at an ally or our forces will be treated as a nuclear weapon and we will respond accordingly. We have no way of being certain such a weapon wouldn't be a nuclear warhead and frankly, we would be hard-pressed to rationalize vaporizing a Chinese city for the loss of a carrier battle group. But if we get out front of it and say we'd hit an airbase or naval base with a small tactical nuke because we are assuming DF-21s are nuclear, perhaps the Chinese would think twice.
A JAGM is too small to do anything relevant to a ship worthy of launching an AShM at in the first place.
ReplyDeleteA Tomahawk is too slow and would be an easy target for CIWS.
How about a cruise missile delivered mk54?
Or high-flying missile with three to four 500lb bombs that have their own EO seekers? The booster gets it to the area and determines a target. On the dive, the missile ejects the bombs ans then acts as a jammer on the way down.
I'm not talking about an anti-shipping missile, (which is also very needed), I'm talking about a hybrid cruise missile/drone that would come in three different versions.
DeleteAll three would be capable of passive or active detection of potential targets and could be launched from submarine, air or ground/surface units (like cold-war GLCM). They'd be launched in the hundreds to fly over likely areas where MRBM, cruise missiles, aircraft, SAM batteries, aircraft would operate.
The A-version would be equipped with a unitary warhead AND sub-munitions like Viper Strike. It might detect a SAM battery or DF21 TEL vehicle, fire a submunition, then after broadcasting all known target information it has encountered, fly on to a target, destroying the target and itself.
The B-version would be equipped with a unitary warhead and a NGM, jamming every signal it can, hacking computer networks, reporting back ELINT/SIGINT, and when it was out of fuel, find the nearest target, destroying the target and itself.
The C-version would have an EMP weapon like the CHAMP. It would collect all the information it could, relay info back to HQ and either identify optimal targets or wait for new targeting info. It could have EMP sub-munitions it could fire at a target, then proceed to the next. Once it ran low on fuel, it would find the attack the nearest target, destroying the target and itself.
All three versions could share real-time targeting information as well as receive ongoing targeting updates transmitted via satellite from HQ that reported the most up-to-date information.
With hundreds of all three versions criss-crossing target areas, it would make the environment too hostile for the enemy in his own territory for significant periods of time.
Keep launching new waves of these cruise-missile and you could suppress enemy defense to allow other traditional assets to take on enemy aircraft, surface vessels, conduct raids, etc.
And don't just launch them from tradition assets either, start looking at converted 747s, container ships and mobile ground-based launchers.
You can have your supersonic missile with 1000 miles coverage, but without over the horizon targeting, it won’t mean a jack. To find and track a single ship from cluster hundred miles away in open ocean, that’s NOT trivial. It's the whole system approach, missile by itself won't matter much. The biggest advantage of LRASM lies with its fully autonomous navigation system independent of external aid. But it will also be equipped with a two way datalink to allow re-targeting after the launch. It can fly a highly unpredictable route to avoid possible exposure to enemy’s defense measurement. The airframe itself is stealthy and RCS performance is the best among the weapons in its class. According to LockMartin, JASSM RCS is “significant” better than competitor offerings such as Storm Shadow or KEPD.
ReplyDeleteNot to mention all the brain inside this thing. You think ships emitting with their radars won't allow this missile to figure out how and where to approach its target so as to minimize detection?
ReplyDeletePeople worry about speed when it comes to AShM, but speed means higher altitude. And speed isn't as much of a protection against being destroyed, as not being detected in the first place.
I think the targeting issue is not the big problem you think it is. Since the LRASM has the ability be re-targeted after launch, and targeting info can be gotten in almost real time from Over-The-Horizon radar (with ranges of 2000+ miles). The hard part will be : (1) getting the bases that will give us the radar coverage that we desire, and (2) updating the LRASM when it is 230 mile away.
ReplyDeleteThe primary advantage of both the LRASM and the NSM is their size and their VLO aspects. The supersonic AShMs are generally larger and much much easier to detect both via radar and via IR sensors. The LRASM and NSM are both smaller and lighter weight and much harder to detect. At least the NSM fits fully within an F35 bay.
ReplyDeleteAs far as targeting, the NSM at least can autotarget via optical recon systems. I would assume that functionality is either in the baseline for the LRASM or in the upgrade plan.
And the general reality of AShM historically is that saturation attacks are required. The actual hit rate against a combat ready ship with actives and passives online and ready is almost non-existent. While the newer missiles have certainly evolved, so have the defensive systems. If you are thinking 1 missile 1 kill with any modern AShM, you are probably being optimistic. If you really need to get a mission kill against a modern ship, you'll need somewhere between 5 and 10 missiles per ship.
Oh and BTW, the main advantage of the LRASM will be VLS compatibility. It will allow us to transform a lot of the existing naval ships into actually effective open water warefare platforms. Currently almost the entire US navel fleet is no more effective in ship to ship warfare than a small/cheap FAC. most of the burkes don't even currently carry any AShMs, which is quite disturbing. The max effective navy attack range of the Burkes and likely most of the US navy is currently 13 miles...
Hence the LRASM will be a massive upgrade fleet wide. The next block of LCS will also likely have VLS, some of which will carry LRASM making the LCS very very deadly ships with somewhere between 16-64 ESSM and 8-16 LRASM on both types.
that's the US Navy's fault. the tomahawk anti-ship missile had an anti-ship variant that used VLS.
DeleteRange of 200+ nm, is only something that DARPA was looking for. Lockheed's Solution, the design based on the JASSMER, has an effective range of over 1000 km....The USN has not issued RFP's for what they want, so its to early to tell whether this is what the USN wants...Raytheon may have something to say about that ;)
ReplyDelete