Technologies enabling strike weapons to receive and send information across a battlefield communications network are to be developed under a contract awarded by the UK Ministry of Defence’s Research Acquisition Organisation to a consortium led by missile manufacturer MBDA.
The programme will focus on the areas of adaptable fuze and warhead integration for in-flight weapon retargeting; guidance-integrated fuzing; battle-damage assessment; networked targeting to reduce targeting times; flexible retargeting of munitions in flight; networked homing sensors to improve targeting accuracy; and cost reductions from the fusion of off-board sensor information with weapon-seeker data.
“Technology concepts developed within this programme will be tested using MBDA’s network-enabled capability weapons testbed to integrate [them] across a high-bandwidth real-time network now in operation,” says Martin Hodgkinson, MBDA business director, systems architecture.
MBDA is leading the consortium working on the two-year Integrated Weapons Research Programme.
Source: Flight International
