Joint Common Missile Will Bolster Navy, Marine and Army Air Power

BY LORENZO CORTES
Special Correspondent

With its sophisticated guidance package, long range and ability to be fired from a variety of platforms, the Joint Common Missile (JCM) will give Army, Navy and Marine Corps aviation crews a powerful new weapon from the air, according to service and industry officials.

The JCM will replace the venerable Lockheed Martin-produced Hellfire missile used for the AH-64D Apache Longbow attack helicopter and the long-serving Raytheon AGM-65 Maverick used by strike aircraft, cutting down on logistics and support chains and offering a common weapon. The Army-led program will provide a missile that can be fired from fixed-wing and rotary-wing aircraft.

Candidates for JCM integration include Boeing’s F/A-18E/F Super Hornet carrier-based strike fighter used by the Navy, the AH-1Z attack helicopter for the Marine Corps and the Army’s AH-64D Apache Longbow attack helicopter. Other potential aircraft include the MH-60S and MH-60R maritime helicopters produced by Sikorsky and Lockheed Martin. Air Force participation at this juncture is not official, but may become so as the program matures, according to industry officials.

A major technological feature of the JCM program is the ability of the weapon to incorporate a tri-mode seeker that combines infrared, millimeter-wave and semi-active laser guidance for greater accuracy and control. JCM would be armed with a unitary warhead and have a range of 16 kilometers.

A pilot flying a carrier-based strike fighter, an attack helicopter or maritime strike helicopter, or an unmanned aerial vehicle operator sitting at his control station could launch the JCM out of sight of enemy ground targets. Even if the approaching missile is spotted, the tri-mode guidance package is designed help prevent efforts to jam or spoof it as it homes in on its target, according to program officials.

In early May, the Army chose Lockheed Martin’s bid to enter the systems development and demonstration (SDD) phase of the JCM program, opening a market for the company that could be worth about $5 billion over the program’s lifetime and result in a production run of 54,000 missiles. Industry teams led by Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and a Boeing-Northrop Grumman pairing also competed for the JCM prime contract.

The initial SDD contract awarded to Lockheed Martin is worth $53 million. Lockheed Martin will produce the JCM at its facility in Troy, Ala. The SDD includes a 14-month risk reduction phase and a 36-month testing and integration phase to ready the JCM for initial production. Lockheed Martin, for its part, began parts of the risk reduction ahead of the SDD down-select decision.

“We are well postured to enter the SDD phase risk-reduction phase with high confidence of success,” said Steven Barnoske, the JCM program director at Lockheed Missiles and Fire Control. “Our extensive pre-contract risk-reduction test program has significantly mitigated risk on the critical subsystems — warhead, motor, tri-mode seeker. Our software is mature and we have demonstrated a low-risk integration solution for both rotary- and fixed-wing platforms.”

Lockheed Martin’s teammates on the winning JCM bid include bomb rack and launcher specialist EDO, General Dynamics for warhead work, PerkinElmer for fuzing, CMC Electronics for the focal plane array, Honeywell for inertial measurement unit technology, Moog for control sections and the British segment of European propulsion house Roxel, REMEC. The first JCMs should enter service in 2010.

Despite its multiservice designation, JCM is not intended to necessarily field a “family” of missiles. There is little, if any, variation among the three service types at present, although that may change over time as the missile is adapted by the services for their unique missions.

JCM evolved from the previous Common Modular Missile requirement, which included provisions for both ground and aviation platforms. The JCM program, at this point, only includes integration onboard aircraft.