Raytheon [RTN] said has it has successfully tested a new version of its Griffin sea-based missile with an extended range and improved targeting capabilities.
The testing took place at the Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona and demonstrated an ability to be updated in flight and redirected to a new target. Three of four firings successfully hit targets, the company said.
Raytheon said the redirect capability in the Griffin C enhances the missiles performance when naval forces encounter threats from small boats intermingling with commercial shipping.
“With its extended range motor, Griffin C’s increased capability addresses the need for a longer range missile with in-flight retargeting,” Thomas Bussing, vice president of advanced missiles at Raytheon Missile Systems, said. “Because they often operate in a high-traffic, littoral waters, naval warfighters must make split-second decisions to engage or disengage targets.”
Griffin C was formally known as the SeaGriffin, and Raytheon hopes to market the missile to the Navy, particularly for the Littoral Combat Ship.
The Navy was planning an older version of Griffin for the LCS program, but said earlier this year it was dropping Griffin and would acquire the Lockheed Martin
[LMT] Longbow Hellfire already in Army stockpiles.
John Hobday, a senior manager for business development at Raytheon Missile Systems in Tucson, Ariz. told Defense Daily in August that the company is confident the Griffin C is a better option for the Navy than the Longbow and wants to demonstrate it to the service next year. Hobday said that the Longbow is an air-based missile and could be difficult to integrate onto ships, whereas the Griffin C is designed for a maritime environment.
“We are conservatively estimating that it’s going to be a whole lot more expensive to modify something that was designed for another mission than it would be to take something that was designed specifically for vertical launch from a ship to hit another ship or a target at sea,” Hobday said.
The Griffin C has a new dual-mode seeker, an extended range motor Raytheon said will triple the range over the current Griffin B, a data link for in-flight target updates and control, thrust vector control and waypoint navigation.