US Air Force awards $705 million contract for F-35 air-to-ground missiles

News, US September 27, 2023 , by IRIA No Comments

The U.S. Air Force awarded a $705 million contract to Northrop Grumman for developing and testing a high-speed air-to-ground weapon for the F-35 Joint Strike fighter jet. The missile has been named Stand-in Attack Weapons (SiAW) and is expected to be delivered by 2026.

According to a statement released by Northrop Grumman, the weapon’s testing and development has entered its second phase. It will take 36 months for the company to test the weapon’s integration capabilities. The statement said that further tests will be carried out at the company’s missile integration facility at Allegany Ballistics Laboratory in West Virginia.

The final phase of weapon development includes platform integration and a flight-testing program for the SiAW. Northrop Grumman said that the U.S. Air Force wants the weapons to be operational by 2026.

The vice president of Northrop Grumman’s advanced weapons department Susan Bruce said that “Northrop Grumman’s SiAW delivers on the Air Force’s desire for its first digital weapons acquisition and development program. With our expert digital engineering capabilities, this next-generation missile represents an adaptable, affordable way for the Department of Defense to buy and modernize weapons.”

Northrop was one of three companies, including Lockheed Martin and L3Harris, that were in competition to win the contract. All three companies received $2 million contracts from the U.S. Air Force in March 2022 for the first phase of developing the SiAW.

Northrop Grumman SiAW — *^{Northrop Grumman’s SiAW rapidly delivers state-of-the-art technology built into mature, low-risk, proven missile capabilities. (Image Credit: Northrop Grumman)}*

The Air Force wants to use the weapon to strike the enemy’s ground-based mobile air defense systems, air defense targets such as integrated air defense systems, ballistic missile launchers, land-attack and anti-ship cruise missile launchers, GPS jammers, and anti-satellite systems.

Northrop Grumman defines the weapons to be a short-range air-to-ground missile that will provide strike capability to defeat rapidly relocatable targets as part of an enemy’s anti-access/area denial environment.

The weapon is designed to have the ability to adapt to ever-changing threats, the missile design features open architecture interfaces that will allow for rapid subsystem upgrades to field-enhanced capabilities for the warfighter. It has an open architecture, which will allow its subsystems to be quickly upgraded with new capabilities.

The U.S. Air Force has paced up its efforts to increase its capabilities to defeat the Anti-Access/Area-Denial (A2AD) strategy. The A2AD strategy has become a fixture of several military strategies to counter the U.S. aerial superiority in the Indo-Pacific region. The concept relies on large numbers of low-cost, long-range missiles that can threaten high-value, low-density assets such as aircraft carriers and strategic bombers.

*^{F-35A Lightning II aircraft moves to refuel on a flight from the UK to the United States. (Image Credit: U.S. Air Force/Staff Sgt. Madelyn Brown)}*

Stealth aircraft, armed with next-generation air-to-ground precision munitions like the SiAW, could potentially disrupt A2AD networks, opening gaps through which more numerous fourth-generation fighters and non-stealthy bombers could flow.