Industry expects LRSO RfP in months
US defence prime contractors vying for the contract to build the nuclear-capable Long-Range Stand-Off (LRSO) missile that will replace the US Air Force's (USAF's) AGM-86 Air-Launched Cruise Missile (ALCM) expect the service to issue a final request for proposal (RfP) in May or June, a Lockheed Martin official said on 15 March.
"We've already had two or three [draft RfPs] and expect a final [one] in May or June and an award next year," Frank St John, vice-president of Lockheed Martin's Tactical Missiles business, told IHS Jane's during a briefing at a company-sponsored media day.
Four prime contractors - Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin - are bidding for two Technical Maturation Risk Reduction contracts, according to St John.
He added that he expects each company to offer a unique technology solution. "Getting four prime contractors to work on something common is challenging, so I wouldn't be surprised if people went in different directions in the end," he said.
Lockheed Martin will draw heavily on lessons from its AGM-158 Joint Air-to-Surface Stand-off Missile (JASSM) for its LRSO offering, he noted. However, the weapon will be an entirely new design not based on any legacy system.
"The requirements are such that nothing we have would fit that bill," St John said. "But I will say that a lot of the lessons that we've learned over the years on JASSM - in terms of survivability, in terms of aircraft integration, mission planning, and the like - are all things that are brought to bear in that competition."
The company's Tactical Missiles and Fire Control business is developing the air vehicle, the mission planning, and the platform integration for its LRSO offering while Lockheed Martin Space Systems conducts payload integration, avionics development, and systems engineering. St John declined to elaborate on the details of the propulsion system.
In December 2012, the Pentagon announced plans to issue separate contracts to Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman for the technology development (TD) phase of the LRSO programme. A request for information released just ahead of that announcement contained no details about whether the USAF was seeking a subsonic, a supersonic, or even a hypersonic weapon. Only a small amount of information about what the service is seeking in an LRSO missile has since entered the public domain.
Senior USAF officials have called the LRSO a stealthy cruise missile and have said the weapon's range would be longer than the 500 n mile (c.900 km) range of the JASSM-ER and closer to the ALCM's range of between 1,200 km and 2,500 km.
The warhead for the nuclear-tipped LRSO is also unknown. The US National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and the USAF have asked Sandia National Laboratories and the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories to examine three existing nuclear warheads for possible use in the LRSO missile: the B61-12 (a nuclear bomb intended to replace four current but ageing B61 variants), the W84 (originally used on the now-retired BGM-109G Ground Launched Cruise Missile), and the W80 (currently used on the nuclear-armed version of the AGM-86).
