By Carlo Munoz
The Navy’s newest long-range, anti-aircraft missile is ready to begin operational testing, as well as a small number of deployments aboard service warships by July, a senior industry official overseeing the program said yesterday.
Program officials from Raytheon [RTN] delivered the first of 19 Low-Rate Initial Production (LRIP) versions of its new SM-6 to the Navy in March, according to Frank Wyatt, vice president of Raytheon’s Air and Missile Defense Systems. “Over five years ago, we set the date in concrete where we would deliver the first production unit in March 2011 and that is exactly what we did,” he said during an interview with Defense Daily.
That initial nine-missile LRIP delivery is the first of three LRIP phases planned. The second LRIP tranche will consist of 11 missiles, with the final 59-missile group rounding out the LRIP program, according to Wyatt.
“Those missiles will find various uses, some in the operational testing, some of them will find their way to deployment,” Wyatt said.
The Navy’s program executive office for integrated weapons systems will be overseeing the next phase of testing and potential deployments of the LRIP variants of the weapon, with tests taking place at the service’s Pacific Missile Range facility Kauai, Hawaii.
Designed as a follow-on to the Navy’s SM-2 Block 4 missile, also developed by Raytheon, the SM-6 shares many of the same technologies as its predecessor, but was outfitted with an active radar seeker technology to allow the weapon to find, fix, target and destroy air targets without support from a ship’s on-board radar system.
Until the SM-6, the Navy’s current ship-based missile arsenal has been controlled with the assistance of the vessel’s radar. “It is substantially an increase compared to SM-2,” Wyatt said, regarding the weapon’s capability. Other advancements in the SM-6 design will allow the weapon to exceed the roughly 100 nautical mile range on the SM-2 missile.
The active radar capability on the SM-6 is the same system on board the joint Navy-Air Force Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missile (AMRAAM) on board the services’ tactical fighters. Integration of the AAMRAM radar, combined with leveraging a majority of the SM-2 Block 4 design, has been key in keeping SM-6 costs in check.
Wyatt could not comment on the estimated per unit cost for the full-rate production version of the new missile, but did note that there was “very aggressive cost goal in the design phase of the missile” adding the company was “on track” to hit a unit cost below that goal once SM-6 production hits a certain pace.
The company’s performance on the weapon’s development has fostered international interest in SM-6 procurement, according to Wyatt. Declining to name the specific countries that could field a version of the weapon, he said Raytheon is working with the Pentagon’s policy shop to see “what could be exported when,” since no country is currently approved to receive exports of the SM-6.
While the program is set to enter into operational tests, the weapon did encounter some difficulties during the developmental testing phase.
Developmental testing on the SM-6 was done in two phases, which included five flight tests in the first phase, according to Wyatt. Of those first five test shots, “there were some issues we had to correct” that led to failures on two of those preliminary test flights, he said.
After addressing those issues related to the flight test failures in the first phase, program officials then fired three more test shots in the second phase, where a “reliability failure” in the third shot led to a record of five successful test shots out of eight during both phased of developmental testing.
However, in spite of that record, the Raytheon missile chief said the overall developmental flight test phase represented “a very successful test program, in terms of the complexity of the threats we were shooting against.”
Further, program officials were able to “demonstrate never-seen-before performance” in the standard missile-class of Navy weapons, particularly in the weapon’s active radar capability “against some very complicated..threats,” he said.
The Raytheon executive was confident that any major glitches on the SM-6 have been worked out, with the weapon fully capable of entering the next phase of testing and development.
“I think we got it [fixed],” he said. “The fact of the matter is that the two issues that we uncovered…one of them came from a piece of the missile that was a legacy piece.” The other issue, he added, was an “interface expansion” issue with the weapon and the Aegis combat system.
“When you step back and look….yeah, we had issues there but they were easily correctable,” Wyatt said. “So we have been successful in demonstrating [the missile].”