UK warhead designers are in discussions with Boeing over fitting the Broach hard target attack/penetrator warhead to its Harpoon and Stand-off Land Attack Missile (SLAM).
Fitting the Harpoon or the SLAM with the Broach would provide them with the capability to be used against hardened or buried targets.
BAe Royal Ordnance, Thomson Thorn Missile Electronics and the UK's Defence Evaluation Research Agency are already working with Hughes on variants of the UK's Broach warhead potentially to arm the Tomahawk and Advanced Cruise Missile. The warhead is also to be evaluated under the US Department of Defense's (DoD) foreign comparative-test (FCT) initiative.
The DoD plans to carry out flight tests of the Broach deep-penetrator warhead in late 1998 under two FCT contracts. The first will cover the Boeing Conventional Air-Launched Cruise Missile(CALCM), with the second involving the Raytheon TISystems Joint Stand-Off Weapon (JSOW).
The CALCM Broach warhead system will consist of a soil-clearance shaped-charge, an augmentation shaped-charge able to penetrate concrete and a follow-through blast/fragmentation warhead designed to explode inside the bunker. A target-detection system will trigger the initial charge at a stand-off distance.
The second test series will involve a smaller, dual-warhead, system developed by Team Broach for the JSOW. This will have an initial penetrating charge and follow-through warhead.
The US Navy is also looking at Matra and Rafael kinetic-energy penetrators for the JSOW.
Source: Flight International