Cruise Missiles, Anti-Tank Missiles, and air to air missiles of the world

RE: STORM SHADOW/SCALP

Completely and Utterly _Worthless_.

If you don't have overhead or standoff 'national asset' access you are effectively using on-fighter apertures to target for a 180-220nm (The French don't believe in MTCR and neither do we) weapon that costs as much as a Tomahawk yet doesn't go half the distance downrange.

If you DO have the aforementioned 'national means' of strategic targeting, why the heck are you putting all of TWO missiles on a fighter whose own immense exposure risk and replacement cost can ONLY be justified by servicing more than a couple aimpoints Both of which may require the tacjet to penetrate a significant distance inside S-300 or better class defenses before it's own apertures can even begin to image (no ASTOR, no JSTARS).

Put them in ships or ground launchers or even on a commercial heavy lift airframe and get pennys per ton mile equivalency.

There are some pics, the purpose of this thread is to have one thread that can deal with these kinds of missiles. So that we could have one thread, instead of tons of threads about different missiles. This missile reminds me of TASSAM, don't you think?

NO. AGM-158, while capable of carriage by conventional fighters (as all the Skyshark, LRSOW, CASOM, APACHE, MRASM competitors for the abortive NATO MSOW program were designed to be, after we finally admitted that USAFE and RAFG were so terribly infiltrated and overtargeted by ballistic weapons that NOTHING could survive on FRG airbases) is being ER'd in the B model to replace ALCM as as an 800-1,000km standoff system for mutiple carriage bombers.

i.e. What Betty-Carrries-Okha _ALL_ cruise weapons have been designed to do since first invention: releverage dated weapons cabinets with kamikaze enablers so that the mooing cow combat platforms can continue to employ /somebody/ without having to justify themselves based on the utterimpossibility of generating or surviving target overflight sortie attrition rates. Which even the ignorant masses would B-17 vs. S-300 Favorit laugh at.

Furthermore, JASSM is a legitmate low-long winged lifting body which carefully maskes its hot/cold side chine separations (including inlet) from surface wave at a variety of aspects and wavelengths as a funtion of release and transit to target in a deliberate medium altitude height band.

Which almost none of the stub wing wonders are really good at matching.

This takes it completely out of the trashfire envelope and 'cubes' the search volume of optical and acoustic as well as shortwave engagement radars hunting it.

It further allows you to use it's imaging IR 'intelligent combat recce' capabilities to select and BIA evaluate on the fly aimpoints which no popup terminal profile has the time or vertical aspect to do.

JASSM also goes someway towards energizing the mini-BROACH warhead for superior penetration.

The penalty for which is considerably more attention to details of shaping against longwave radars whose lolo horizonline is fairly short.

The latter (TERPROM'd flight profile) explains why the Storm Shadow is little more than a wide+short flyin //box// since it cannot afford to jeopardize tacjet carrying standards (30" lug on a short, stiff, wing means a lot of air load and accelerative transfer on both munition and parent. It also jeopardizes ventral fuselage carriag on the M2000 and Tornado completely due to gear clearance and CG issues).

It does not however justify a straight stare up the inlet and down the slab sided flanks to the tail from systems ranging from SA-15 to Clam Shell, all of which should see this nominally 'sneaky not cloaked' missile _just fine_.

Furthermore, it is a slow hunk of junk.

Which means, provided you put the interceptor IN AIR rather than sitting in some moronic tube or rail, you can chase the cruise down from behind using optical or MMW/noise seeker technology to characterize the weapon and/or it's plume against a near-infinite (even 'look up' /bright/) horizon line

And once the idiots and fools who run today armies get their petty little brains warped around the concept of EVERYONE using cruise technologies to save their precious 'no LO' shooters from annihilaton; weapons like MALI and M-THEL will make it just as easy to bag a 2 million dollar (at the time Flugrevue reported the Luftwaffe rejecting it) APACHE followon as they do today's LGB and dumb iron droppers.

At which point, having commited to buying an inventory of gold plated wildebeeste that can be run down or flash-of-light obliterated by pack-hyena; you will ALSO no longer have the simple numbers required to kill the average abdullah hauling a donkey load of mortar shells over the Khyber Pass. Which is where 70% of all wars start and end (COIN/OOTW) and the role for which, traditionally, a cheap manned platform was thought superior to an 'all missile' approach.

In point of fact, the closest point of comparison I can make with this robotic biplane is the LLAD/LOCPOD which was a similar box-crate design, whose intended purpose (purely as a _1978-85_ testbed mind you) was to confirm that F-4E, F-111, A-10 (with booster) and F-15E's could sling 2,500 submunitions over WARPAC armored column without ever crossing a nearpoint (8-11nm) horizon line using the simplest of attitude-hold+steering uplink autopilot technologies.

When we were satisfied that was a hollow (Assault Breaker in an SS-20 environment) mission set, we chubbed it off on the USN where it formed the technology bed basis of AIWS/JSOW. And even that was at least a moderately cheap GLIDE munition which even the feeble Ho-net could carry 4 of.

You want to impress someone, make it cheaper and a whole helluva lot faster.

Smaller and/or capable of hitting 6-10 targets with it's own (individually targeted and separated) payloads from a tacjet would also be cool.

As would the netcentric targeting capability to active-folder frag those targets on an 'opportunistic' (24:7:365) time criticals basis.

This is just the crass penile envy of a ROW about 20 years behind the times on 'how to best assassinate your fellow humans at maximum standoff profit for the mil-industrial ba$e'.

Been there, done that too.


>>
Also its cool that our allies are developing long range strike weapons, then if we were in a major war we could colaberate and launch them together.
>>

You've gotta be joking.

What friends do we have that feel the urgent need to develop 'independent means' to do what we already do better while counting on the Arsenal Of Democracy to provide simple things like Mk.82 bombs and GBU-12 guidance kits with which to make them useful (at our cost for their 'coparticipation' of course).

Oh yeah. Wee Wee. And all it cost us was an F-117.


KPl.