Navy chooses Raytheon and Kongsberg to build land-attack and anti-ship missile for LCS and future frigate
WASHINGTON – U.S. Navy surface warfare experts are asking the Raytheon Co. to design and build the Navy's next-generation anti-ship and land-attackmissile for the littoral combat ship (LCS) and future frigate.
Officials of the Naval Sea Systems Command in Washington announced a potential $847.6 million contract Thursday to the Raytheon Missile Systems segment in Tucson, Ariz., for the Over-the-Horizon Weapon System (OTH-WS).
Raytheon is building the new missile in partnership with Kongsberg Gruppen in Kongsberg, Norway. The missile is to equip the LCS and future frigate with stand-off surface-to-surface weapons capability.
This contract calls for Raytheon to build encanistered missiles loaded into launchers, one fire-control suite, mission-support equipment, training equipment, and engineering services.
Related: Raytheon, Kongsberg to produce Naval Strike Missile in U.S.
Raytheon and Kongsberg in their initial OTH-WS bid offered the Naval Strike Missile (NSM) -- a fifth-generation long-range, precision-strike missile that offers strike capability against heavily defended land and sea targets. NSM is a modernized version of the Norwegian Penguin anti-ship missile.
The passive subsonic sea-skimming missile can penetrate advanced enemy defense systems, and has an upgraded seeker and target identification, Raytheon officials say. The NSM is aboard Norway's new frigates and coastal corvettes, and gives surface warships sufficient firepower to defeat evolving threats.
The NSM uses composite materials for enhanced stealth, and a titanium-alloy blast-and-fragmentation warhead with void-sensing programmable intelligent multi-purpose fuze for use against hard targets like surface ships.
The missile has an imaging infrared seeker, an onboard target database, and navigates by Global Positioning System (GPS), inertial sensors, and terrain-reference systems. It can detect, recognize, and discriminate among targets independently, and is designed to strike enemy ships at or near the water line to inflict maximum structural damage.
Aboard ships, NSMs can be deck-mounted in packs of one, two, three, four, or six launchers. The NSM weighs about 880 pounds and has a range of about 100 nautical miles. It can be used in littoral waters near coasts, or in the open ocean. The missile can fly over and around land masses, travel in sea-skim mode, and then make random maneuvers in terminal phase to avoid enemy countermeasures.
Raytheon will build a NSM fire-control suite with operator interface, interfaces to the launchers, engagement planning system, and interface to host ship systems like GPS and inertial navigation systems. Its fire-control system will be able to launch from four to 16 missiles.
Raytheon will receive $14.9 million up-front, and will compete for a series of options that could increase the contract's value to as much as $847.6 million. On this contract Raytheon and Kongsberg will do the work in Kongsberg, Norway; Tucson, Ariz.; Schrobenhausen, Germany; Raufoss, Norway; McKinney, Texas; and Louisville, Ky., and should be finished by May 2020.
For more information contact Raytheon Missile Systems online at www.raytheon.com, Kongsberg Gruppen at www.kongsberg.com, or Naval Sea Systems Command at www.navsea.navy.mil.
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John Keller | Editor
John Keller is editor-in-chief of Military & Aerospace Electronics magazine, which provides extensive coverage and analysis of enabling electronic and optoelectronic technologies in military, space, and commercial aviation applications. A member of the Military & Aerospace Electronics staff since the magazine's founding in 1989, Mr. Keller took over as chief editor in 1995.
