US Navy's SLAM ER turns corner on mobile targets

By Stephen Trimble

Boeing's AGM-84H SLAM-ER missile has demonstrated a new ability to strike mobile, land-based targets, such as missile launchers, using targeting data supplied by a third party.

The missile on 12 January acquired and scored a direct hit against a target moving at about 10kt (19km/h) amid a "cluttered desert environment".

Boeing released few details about the test conditions, but US Navy officials previously described plans to engage a moving ground target as it turned along a 90° bend in the road.

The target was first acquired by an aircraft equipped with the Littoral Radar Surveillance System (LSRS), a ground moving target indicator sensor installed aboard at least seven US Navy P-3Cs.

The LSRS passed the targeting data to a Boeing F/A-18F, which relayed the information to a second F/A-18F that fired the missile.

The USN-funded test capped a four-part series of demonstrations that stretched over two years. The capability will become operational "as soon as they finish going over test results", Boeing says.

Striking a mobile land target as it makes a sharp turn marks a new level of achievement in the US munitions community's 40-year campaign to design ever-increasing levels of precision into stand-off weapons.

The SLAM-ER had been due for retirement as late as 2003, but the USN's decision to drop out of the Joint Air to Surface Standoff Missile programme kept the weapon in the inventory.

The USN began experimenting with SLAM-ER against mobile land targets in the late 1990s. Early tests involved firing the SLAM-ER from a modified Lockheed Martin NP-3C nicknamed Hairy Buffalo.