Saddam Hussein, Colonel Gadaffi and other leaders around the world may be interested - or worried - to hear that the Pentagon has decided to test Britain's deep penetrating Broach missile warhead.
The Broach is a high-technology warhead designed to blast through the layers of concrete of buried command bunkers, hardened aircraft shelters and ammunition stores.
Chemical
The USAF is keen to find warheads capable of punching through, for instance, to a deeply-buried Libyan factory, suspected of being used as a chemical weapons plant.
Press reports have suggested that no conventional warhead in the current US inventory is able to defeat this sort of target.
British Aerospace's Royal Ordnance subsidiary, Thomson Thorn Missile Electronics and the UK's Defence Evaluation and Research Agency have been awarded a US Foreign Comparative Test Contract to allow the Pentagon to test the Broach on the Joint Stand-Off Weapon (JSOW) and the Conventional Air Launched Cruise Missile (CALCM).
These are both long-range precision guided weapons, with the latter weapon currently in service on USAF B-52 bombers. The JSOW is still under development.
The test contract involves an 18-month performance assessment culminating in live missile-to-target tests for CALCM and a down-selection for the JSOW's unitary warhead requirement.
John Stephen, managing director of Royal Ordnance, and David Price, of Thomson Thorn Missile Electronics, say the US contract is a significant milestone for the Team Broach.
"This builds upon the selection of a Broach system for the UK Conventional Stand-Off Missile Programme.
"We are now able to offer the US customer a unique improvement in its capability to defeat hard targets with stand-off missiles."
Penetrator
The Broach warhead achieves its results by combining an initial penetrator charge with a secondary follow-through bomb, supported by a multi-event hard target fuse.
After witnessing a highly-successful trial in the UK, Col Richard Woods, of the USAF Cruise Missile Product Group at Tinker AFB, commented: "We are pleased to team with Boeing Aerospace and Team Broach on this collaborative effort and look forward to providing the US warfighter with a technology currently available."
Source: Flight Daily News
