By Michael Sirak
Senior Air Force weapons developers expressed optimism last week that the JASSM cruise missile is on a course for recovery and will be able to overcome lingering reliability issues that have placed its future in question.
“I am confident that we are on the road to getting this thing back in shape,” Maj. Gen. David Eidsaune, the Air Force’s program executive officer for Weapons, said of the JASSM during a presentation Oct. 10 at the 33rd Air Armament Symposium in Ft. Walton Beach, Fla. “I am sure we will get this certified next spring.”
Air Force Acquisition Executive Sue Payton, speaking the same day at the symposium said: “We are putting everything we can into getting this JASSM program corrected.”
Lockheed Martin [LMT] builds the JASSM, which stands for Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile. The Air Force designates the missile the AGM-158. Already there are more than 600 JASSMs in the Air Force’s inventory. The GPS-guided missiles are designed to penetrate heavily defended airspace to knock out high-value fixed targets.
“The JASSM, when it works, it’s great,” Eidsaune told the symposium audience.
But the missile has had a history of performance issues in flight tests to date caused by the subpar reliability of components. Most recently, a spate of four unsuccessful flights in April had to do with the loss of the GPS signal on three missiles and a fuze anomaly on the fourth.
The recent test failures occurred around the time that OSD was reviewing the JASSM program per U.S. law as a result of significant growth in its cost baseline due to factors mostly outside of the performance issues like requirements changes and the Air Force’s desire roughly to double the number of JASSMs it buys. As a result, the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) chose to hold off on deciding whether to continue the missile program by certifying per the law that it remains critical to national security and is essential despite the cost increases (Defense Daily, June 7).
Instead, the JASSM program is in the midst of a nine-month phase-one reliability-characterization effort that OSD approved in July (Defense Daily, July 20 and July 23). Activities including data analyses, ground tests and free flights will serve as the basis on which OSD weapon’s czar will determine the weapon’s fate around April 2008.
“We will turn that program around,” said Payton. “I have told everyone that when I walk away [from my current position], the JASSM should be the most kick-ass missile that we have ever created in our arsenal. And if it can’t be that, then we will start over.”
Indeed, as part of the current activities, the Air Force is examining alternatives to JASSM as due diligence in case the missile gets the ax. Toward that end, the service issued a request for information for the alternatives on Sept. 17 (Defense Daily, Sept. 21). Formal white paper responses are due by Nov 17, the Air Force says.
As for JASSM, the Air Force said it recently completed a successful functional ground test under the phase-one activities to verify the fixes for the GPS dropout issue that arose in April. Flight tests are scheduled for early next year.
On Monday, the Air Force awarded Lockheed Martin a $38 million indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity contract towards covering the phase-one activities.
Payton credited the efforts of Judy Stokley, Eidsaune’s deputy, with keeping the missile program alive through its trying times.
“I will tell you that if it hadn’t been for Ms. Judy Stokley, the JASSM might not exist right now,” she said. “She has shown more tenacity and more patience than anyone I have met.”
The JASSM has a range greater than 200 nautical miles in its baseline configuration. An extended-range variant under development could reach targets at distances greater than 500 nautical miles, the Air Force and Lockheed Martin say.
“It is a critical weapon for us, especially as the CALCM [Conventional Air-Launched Cruise Missile] continues to age and we draw down its inventory,” Maj. Gen. Mark Matthews, director of plans and programs for Air Combat Command, said at the weapon symposium Oct. 10. “The long-range standoff capability is obviously integral to all of our concepts, especially with the diminished number of…tactical systems that we are looking at in the future.”
The National Defense Industrial Association and Air Force’s Air Armament Center sponsored the Air Armament Symposium.