By Geoff Fein

The Navy is currently not looking to add a maritime variant of the Air Force Joint Air to Surface Standoff Missile (JASSM) to its weapons inventory, relying instead on planned upgrades to its existing Harpoon and Joint Stand Off Weapon (JSOW) to carry out maritime interdiction missions, according to a Navy official.

"Is the Navy pursuing JASSM? No. The Navy is not pursuing JASSM," Navy Capt. Mat Winter, program manager for Precision Strike Weapons, told Defense Daily, sister publication of Space & Missile Defense Report.

"Is the Department of the Navy … eyeing JASSM, and understanding its capability for potential future evaluation? Absolutely. But right now we have Harpoon and SLAM-ER and in the near term Harpoon Block III and JSOW-C1, for the [Navy] maritime interdiction road map."

Lockheed Martin Corp. [LMT] makes the AGM-158 JASSM. The Boeing Co. [BA] makes both the A/R/UGM-64 Harpoon and the AGM-84K Standoff Land Attack Missile-Expanded Response. Raytheon Co. [RTN] makes the JSOW-C1.

The Navy has been tasked by both the Joint Staff and the Pentagon with the primary mission area role for maritime activities and interdiction, Winter said.

"When those mission areas are assigned, those services lay out their operational plans and business plans to ensure we have material solutions and weapon systems that our warfighter can effectively and efficiently engage and be successful in those mission areas," he said. "When we talk about maritime interdiction, one might say why is the Air Force engaged in maritime interdiction?

"That’s not a question I am going to engage with," he added. "From a PMA 201 perspective, our surface to surface, air to surface anti-ship and maritime interdiction capability, the Harpoon weapon system is our workhorse."

PMA-201 is the Precision Strike Weapons Program Office.

In addition to the Harpoon missile, the Navy also has SLAM-ER to engage maritime interdiction, Winter said.

Next year, Lockheed Martin will begin work on a JASSM anti-surface warfare variant. It will feature a data link and provide maritime interdiction capabilities, line of sight communications and flexible and emerging targeting, a company spokeswoman said.

"We anticipate the ASuW (anti-surface warfare) variant in Lot 11, with fielding scheduled for 2013. JASSM ASuW is currently only an Air Force program," Heather Kelly, spokeswoman for Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control, told Defense Daily. The Navy will soon have its own data linked weapons: Harpoon Block III and JSOW-C1, C1 which is integrating a data link into a JSOW to effectively engage maritime moving targets, specifically ships at sea, Winter said.

"Harpoon Block III and JSOW-C1 are our family of networked enabled weapons," he said. "We are in currently in development of both those and they share a similar acquisition strategy of modifying current capability."

The Navy will add a data link to its existing inventory of Harpoon and JSOW-C weapon systems, at a minimal cost, Winter noted.

"So that we can provide target updates to the missile while it is in flight. So that we can provide the latest position of that moving ship to the Harpoon Block III or JSOW- C1, prior to their seeker turn on, so that their seeker has the highest probability of acquisition of opening up and looking exactly at the target we want to kill," he explained.

"So Harpoon III and JSOW-C1 are, right now, material solutions in development to address Navy’s warfighter capability gap of cluttered maritime environments," Winter added. "[An area where there are] lots of ships around each other and we want to make sure we kill the right one."

Initial Operational Capability for the two new data linked weapons is in the FY ’10 to FY ’12 time frame, Winter said.

While the Navy is upgrading and modernizing its cache of strike weapons, potential adversaries are also looking at ways to defeat those weapons. Winter said the Navy works hard to make sure it remains a step ahead.

"Vulnerability analysis of our weapon systems is continuously conducted to ensure that the currently fielded capabilities are still viable in the threat environment they operate in," he said. "When and if…or maybe not…that assessment and analysis shows we have short falls, [I am ] not saying we have them…then we address that appropriately to either modify or [start] a new program.

"Right now the Harpoon weapon system is effective against its entire target set for the level of kill required by our warfighters," Winter added.

The three levels of kill the Navy is referring to when it is talking about any munition against the target are: Firepower kill; Mobility kill; and Catastrophic kill, Winter said.

"The effectiveness trade off analysis that’s done is–does it take one weapon to give me a level of kill…do I need multiple weapons against the same target for the same level of kill…that analysis is conducted and we determine usually the trade off there is capacity versus a design change," he said.

For example, if the Navy has a munition that all it wants to do hit a ship and make sure its defensive systems or more importantly its offensive systems are killed, but not sink the ship, that’s called a firepower kill, Winter explained.

"That obviously would take less munition than if I wanted to sink the ship to the bottom which is a catastrophic kill," he added.

The effort the Navy is pursuing with both Harpoon Block III and JSOW-C1, to add data links to both platform to provide better final coordinates of the target in question, will enable engagement with whatever kill level the warfighter is asking for at that time, Winter said.

"It could be a firepower only, could be a mobility, or might be catastrophic. It’s really dependent upon the specific warfighting scenario they are asking us to go against," he added.

Because of the concern with collateral damage, and the desire to bring that down to zero, there are current science and technology efforts that PMA 201 is pursuing in what is called selectable output technologies, or what some more commonly refer to as dial a yield, a term Winter isn’t particularly fond of. "We call it selective output technologies."

"I can carry a single munition, and because of the current environment of reduced environmental damage, [I can] give my warfighter the tactical flexibility of carrying a single munition and being able to engage not only different target sets, but also different political ROEs (rules of engagement) on the same flight," he added.

One program, that Winter calls the blue collar effort, is the BLU-126 Low Collateral Damage Bomb (LCDB).

"If you are familiar with a BLU-111, a 500-pound bomb body, we completed an effort on that about a year ago. All we did, we took out 85 percent of the PBX-109…the high explosive content of that bomb…and fill it with glass beads, leaving roughly 27 pounds of high explosives," Winter said. "When you detonate that 500-pound bomb body, you get a poof instead of a bang."

The first war time use of LCDB was on July 27, 2007 off a Marine Corps F-18 against an insurgent vehicle. The second use was Aug. 8, 2007 (Defense Daily, Jan. 7).

LCDB is one end of the spectrum, where the selectable output, though fixed, was fixed at a very low end that provided warfighters, specifically in Iraq, an air delivered precisely guided low collateral munition, Winter said. LCDB allows troops in the field to call in direct fire, and to be in close proximity of the impact without being subject to the hazardous effects, yet still lethal enough to take out the folks that were planting improvised explosive devices, for example.

The BLU-126 LCDB is already processed, packaged and authorized for shipboard use by the safety community (Defense Daily, Jan. 7).

Winter said there are concepts out there, some proprietary, to develop a truly scalable weapon.

"[These technologies are being pursued at the science and technology level, like at ONR (Office of Naval Research)," he said. "We are partnered with them in a selectable output, what they call an enabling capability, to pursue a more technological maturation of that capability to a point where it could come to me to put into a development program so we spend money wisely. And there are a number of industrial base independent research and development efforts."