Raytheon’s Task: More Missiles, on the Double
After using more than a third of its inventory of Tomahawk cruise missiles in the first 12 days of the war in Iraq, the Pentagon is scrambling to replenish the supply and has asked missile maker Raytheon Corp. to accelerate production of a new generation of the weapon.
Since the war began March 20, the Navy has launched more than 740 cruise missiles, leaving about 1,150 in its arsenal, raising concerns that if the pace continues there will not be enough for possible future conflicts.
The missiles, launched from submarines and ships, are designed to fly a few hundred feet off the ground to avoid radar detection and hit key targets deep inside a country. The Tomahawks are used mainly to spearhead a military campaign and strike targets difficult to attack otherwise.
About three dozen Tomahawks were fired at what U.S. officials believed was Saddam Hussein’s hide-out in the opening attack of the war.
“We’re not running out of cruise missiles, but we’re getting close,” said Loren Thompson, a defense analyst with the Lexington Institute, an Arlington, Va., public policy group. “If we keep using them at the current rate, we could get into the danger zone. And if we move into a new conflict quickly, we may not have enough of them.”
A Pentagon official said Wednesday that the Navy has enough of the missiles to do “whatever is asked of us,” but added that it is using the Tomahawks at a faster pace than expected.
Production of the Tomahawks stopped in 1999 after about 3,000 were built. They were developed by General Dynamics Corp. engineers in San Diego before Raytheon took over the operation and moved production to Tucson. In the last decade the U.S. had fired as many as 1,100 of the missiles, many of them during the 1991 Persian Gulf War and in the Balkans in the late 1990s.
Two years ago, Pentagon officials asked Raytheon to restart production, and the company was scheduled to begin producing an upgraded Tomahawk later this year. But in recent days Pentagon officials have asked the company to push up the timetable by a few months.
Moreover, the Navy now wants Raytheon to boost production from 456 a year, as planned, to 600, according to the company and Navy officials.
The new version, dubbed the Tactical Tomahawk, can hover over an area for two to three hours, then strike a target that may have emerged after the missile was launched. Using a satellite-based global positioning navigation system and other guidance systems, it can be “retasked,” or ordered to strike a different target, in flight.
The new missiles cost about $1.4 million each, about double the price of the current model.
John Pike, a military analyst for GlobalSecurity.org, a defense research firm, said Pentagon officials are worried about the inventory because, under its strategic doctrine, U.S. forces should be able to fight two simultaneous wars if the need arises. As a result, he said, some missiles are held in reserve.
“They’ve fired most of the ones they’ve allocated for Iraq,” Pike said.
