Breaking Defense:
For all the US Navy’s worldwide might, it’s painfully short on ship-killing firepower. The Pacific fleet in particular risks being “out-sticked” by longer-ranged Chinese missiles. Today, the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations outlined a plan to fill that gap. The two competing options: an update of the old, reliable Tomahawk or the new Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile.
Lockheed Martin’s LRASM, a modified Air Force missile, should compete against an upgrade of Raytheon’s Tomahawk to be the Navy’s next-generation Offensive Anti-Surface Warfare (OASuW) weapon, Vice Adm. Joseph Aucoin said today. The Navy would still buy LRASMs as an interim measure to meet the “urgent operational need” of Pacific Command, he said, but “the [long-term] follow-on to that, we will compete broadly.”
The Raytheon-built Tomahawk is famous for attacking stationary targets on land, but except for a short-lived anti-ship variant now out of service, it’s not been used against mobileor floating targets. That changed dramatically in January, when a modified Tomahawk punched a hole through a shipping container on the deck of a moving ship. (The test missile didn’t have a live warhead).
The tech-savvy Deputy Defense Secretary,Bob Work, called the Tomahawk’s new capability a “game-changing” piece of the military’s new offset strategy.
Auction told reporters at at the Center for Strategic and International Studies that he wants “a competition to get the best munition” possible. “What I would like to see happen is take those capabilities that we need and start inserting those into a Block IV [Tomahawk], and [compare that] to what we have with LRASM Increment 1, and have those two compete for the next-generation strike weapon,” Aucoin said. Block IV is the latest-generation Tomahawk with a new warhead and new datalinks, but it’s still limited — for now — to land targets.
