T
HE US MILITARY received
its fi rst Tomahawk cruise
missile in 1983. Now 32 years
later, American troops are still
teaching the far-fl ying smart
munition new tricks.
In a test on January 29, a team of US
Marines called in an upgraded Tomahawk,
called a Block IV, to quickly strike a nearby
target — just like the Marines routinely do
with their artillery, Harrier attack jets and
Cobra helicopter gunships.
This is not what the Tomahawk normally
does. By applying new software and
procedures, the Marines have transformed
the super -accurate missile with its 1,000 lb
warhead into a close-support weapon — one
they can dial up to blast the enemy during,
say, fast- moving street-to-street fi ghting on
some urban battlefi eld. Meanwhile, the US
Navy is teaching the land -attack Tomahawk
to also be an anti -ship missile.
This is a big, big deal. The US military
is getting powerful new weapons without
actually buying much new hardware.
The Pentagon keeps thousands of the
million-dollar-a-piece Tomahawks in
stock — the precise number is classifi ed.
Mainly, the US Navy launches them from
submarines and surface ships to punch
holes in enemy air defenses at the start of
bombing campaigns. After all, there’s no
pilot on board, so it’s no big deal if some of
the Tomahawks get shot down.
Most recently, barrages of sea-launched
Tomahawks opened up the air wars in Libya
in 2011 and Syria in 2014.
Traditionally, the subsonic cruise missile
motors at low altitude, propelled by its
turbofan engine over a distance of up to
1,000 miles. The early-model Tomahawks
are ‘fi re and forget’ weapons that follow
a pre-planned path, scanning the terrain
below and comparing it to digital maps they
keep stored in their memory to keep track of
where they are.More recent versions of the Tomahawk
can also home in on GPS co-ordinates. But
for the missile’s fi rst two decades, it was a
pretty infl exible weapon. You had to plot
its course days in advance. And once you
pressed the launch button, the missile was
beyond your control.
That began to change in the early 2000s,
when the US Navy started buying the easier-
to-use Block IV version of the missile from
Raytheon. The Block IV has the ability to
communicate with its launch vessel while
in the air.
That means a ship’s crew can switch a
Tomahawk’s target in mid -fl ight — or even
launch a Tomahawk and tell it to fl y in
circles for a few hours near enemy territory,
waiting to strike until someone spots a
specifi c target and feeds the location to the
missile.
The new and improved Block IV
Tomahawk has inspired a lot of innovation.
In 2011, the Navy and Air Force
collaborated on a startling experiment over
the China Lake bombing range in California.
The Navy lobbed a Tomahawk into the air
and an Air Force F-22 Raptor relayed data
to the missile to guide the munition to its
target.
And at China Lake on January 27 this year,
the Navy tested out the Block IV’s ability to
hit a moving ship at sea.
The sailing branch maintained a few
anti-ship Tomahawks back in the 1980s
but got rid of them when it determined
that it possessed no reliable way of
steering the missiles many hundreds of
miles to strike an enemy warship that’s
constantly moving.
Instead, the Navy made do with
short-range Harpoon anti-ship missiles,
until the January test proved the latest
Tomahawk could fi nally do the job of
sinking a vessel.
The destroyer USS Kidd launched a
Block IV Tomahawk. A Navy F/A-18ESuper Hornet spotted a drone target vessel
and beamed the co-ordinates to a ground
station, which then passed them to the
cruise missile — all in near-real time.
The Tomahawk smashed into the drone
ship. ‘This demonstration is the fi rst step
toward evolving Tomahawk with improved
network capability and extends its reach
from fi xed and mobile to moving targets’,
Raytheon boasted in a press release.
Bob Work, the deputy secretary of defense,
labeled the test Tomahawk ‘a 1,000-mile
anti-ship cruise missile’ and declared it
‘potentially a game-changing capability for
not a lot of cost.’
The experimentation continued. Two
days after the anti-ship test, Marines on
San Nicolas Island off the coast of southern
California radioed the destroyer Kidd
with the co-ordinates of a mock enemy
position. Kidd responded by quickly fi ring a
Tomahawk, taking advantage of the Block IV
missile’s streamlined launch procedure.
‘Using GPS navigational updates, the
missile performed a vertical dive to impact
on San Nicolas Island, scoring a direct hit
on the target designated by the Marines’,
Raytheon announced.
Now imagine combining all the Block IV’s
new skills. Before a battle, the US Navy
— and the UK’s Royal Navy, which also
operates the Tomahawk — could
fi re a bunch of the missiles into the
air. They loiter until the ground
troops get into trouble. The troops
send GPS co-ordinates to any
missiles hanging out nearby.
After just a few minutes,
Tomahawks slam into the
enemy forces, even if the bad
guys are already on the move.
The American troops sustain
the assault, quickly ordering up
additional Tomahawks until the
enemy gives in.
It’s on-call, fast-reacting,
robotic close air support. And
unprecedented.
Three decades after the
Tomahawk’s debut, the Pentagon
is still buying fresh copies of the
drone munition. It could continue
doing so for many years.
Who knows what other new tricks
the old cruise missile might learn.‘A Navy F/A-18E Super Hornet spotted a drone
target vessel and beamed the co-ordinates to a
ground station, which then passed them to the
cruise missile — all in near-real time’
A Block IV Tomahawk about to deliver a
decisive blow to a target on the NAWS
China Lake ranges. US NavyTEACHING AN OLD CRUISE MISSILE NEW TRICKS
96 May 2015 http://www.combataircraft.netBY DAVID AXEDispatches from the front line
of aerospace technology96 Cutting Edge C.indd 96 20/03/2015 11:12