The new missile will give the service's F-35As a key tool to rapidly destroy air defenses, ballistic and cruise missile launchers, and other threats.
Orbital ATK
The U.S. Air Force has revealed that it is working to turn the U.S. Navy’ s Advanced Anti-Radiation Guided Missile-Extended Range, or AARGM-ER, into a fast-flying strike weapon that its F-35A Joint Strike Fighters will be able to use against a variety of time-sensitive targets. This is something that The War Zone had thought would be the case based on previous information about this program. The new missile would give those stealthy jets, as well as other aircraft in the future, an important tool for quickly knocking down anti-access and area denial threats, as well as destroying pop-up targets on short notice.
What appears to be the first public announcement that the AARGM-ER would serve as the basis for what the Air Force officially refers to as the Stand In Attack Weapon, or SiAW, was included in detailed documents about the service’s budget proposal for Fiscal Year 2020, which it released on Mar. 18, 2019. Mention of the SiAW had first appeared in the Air Force’s budget request for the 2018 fiscal cycle, which came out in February 2017, but the line items made no mention of using a particular missile as the starting point.
The “Stand In Attack Weapon (SiAW) system will provide strike capability to defeat rapidly relocatable targets that create the Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD) environment,” the Air Force’s latest budget request explains. “The target environment includes Theater Ballistic Missile Launchers, Land Attackand Anti-Ship Cruise Missile Launchers, GPS Jammers, Anti-Satellite Systems, and Integrated Air Defense Systems.”
The Navy, which is already the lead on the AARGM-ER program, is in charge of the development of the SiAW variant. The Air Force is handling integrating the missile onto the F-35A, which is its threshold launch platform. Northrop Grumman is developing the weapon having purchased the company that first created the design, Orbital ATK, in 2017.
Joseph Trevithick
The SiAW will feature a different warhead and fuze, of unspecified types, which the Navy began working on in the 2019 Fiscal Year. The Navy already has a requirement for the AARGM-ER to fit inside the weapon bays of its F-35C, so the new variant just needs to retain a similar dimensional profile for the F-35A to carry it internally.
The Air Force will also need to make sure the flight computer on its jets can “talk” with the missile, something the service has been working on itself since FY19. The USAF's latest budget proposal asks for nearly $163 million in additional funding to continue this developmental work.
The AARGM-ER is already set to be an extremely capable missile. This is why it seemed like an obvious choice for at least a starting place for the SiAW to us at The War Zone last year.
The AARGM-ER is derived from the AGM-88E Advanced Anti-Radiation Guided Missile (AARGM), the latest variant of the already proven High-Speed Anti-Radiation Missile (HARM), which is already much more than just an air defense-busting radar-homing missile. This missile has multi-mode guidance capability that includes a GPS-assisted inertial navigation system and a millimeter wave radar seeker.
This allow the missiles to hit targets that have stopped emitting radio signals to home in on, or may never have been emitting in the first place, or simply hit a specific location. The missile also has a two-way data link so the launching aircraft, or another source, can feed it new target information in flight. The AARGM-ER will have this exact same guidance package and the Air Force's budget documents make no mention of the SiAW needing a new guidance system.