The Navy, which began developing the small, lightweight Spike missile over a decade ago to teach young engineers how to build weapons, is now looking to get the missile into warfighters’ hands after being impressed with how it performed in a series of tests against unmanned aircraft and other growing threats.
Over the next two years, the Navy plans to complete Spike’s development, conduct more tests and begin producing a fieldable missile, said Spike project manager Gavin Swanson.
“Every warfighter I’ve ever shown this to says, ‘How many can I have and when can I deploy with it?’” Swanson told Defense Daily March 3. “If this is something that they want, we want to give it them.”
The 7-pound, 25-inch-long, 2.25-inch-diameter missile is small enough for a person “to carry a few of them,” and could ultimately be fired from a wide range of configurations, including a shoulder-mounted launcher, Swanson said.
Spike’s fire-and-forget capability is also seen as an advantage over many existing systems. “A lot of our systems today are laser-designated and you have to sit there and lase the target until you hit it,” he said. “That reduces your ability to hit a target and move on to the next.”
Another Spike selling point is that the warhead, which weighs under a pound, is designed to be precise to minimize collateral damage. “If you want that truck over there to go away, we can make the truck go away and the building next door to it is probably going to be okay,” Swanson said.
The Navy expects to achieve a relatively low per-unit cost of $25,000 to $35,000.
“It’s significantly cheaper than what could be similar solutions,” he said. It’s “a third of the cost of some of the other systems that are out there right now. If you need to shoot two at [a target], you’re still going to save money.”
Some of the development work that lies ahead for Spike involves replacing parts that have become obsolete during the missile’s long development period. While the Navy expects to buy missile parts from industry, it envisions doing Spike’s final assembly itself at Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake in California.
The Navy said it has successfully tested Spike against unmanned aerial vehicles, small boats and light ground vehicles. For instance, in a December demonstration at China Lake, two ground-launched Spikes shot down two Griffin Aerospace-built Outlaw UAVs.
“UAVs and small boats have emerged as a pretty substantial threat at this point, and … we’ve shown that we can solve that problem to some extent,” Swanson said. “For the small UAV threats, right now they’re trying to use a lot of different things, and we feel like we could be a better solution than some of the things they’re trying.”