Lockheed Developing AIM-260 To Counter China’s PL-15

Raytheon’s three-decade grip on the U.S. military’s long-range air-to-air missile inventory will soon end. Lockheed Martin won a secret competition in 2017 to develop and field an even longer-range air intercept missile by 2022. U.S. fighter pilots will, at last, have access to a weapon with equivalent range to China’s PL-15, Europe’s MBDA Meteor and Russia’s Vympel R-37M.

The existence of the AIM-260 Joint Air Tactical Missile (JATM) was made public during a June 20 media roundtable in Dayton, Ohio, with Brig. Gen. Anthony Genatempo, the Air Force’s program executive officer for weapons. When asked for an update on the Air Force’s long-fixed portfolio of air-dominance weapons, including the short-range Raytheon AIM-9X Sidewinder and long-range AIM-120 Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile (Amraam), Genatempo dropped any pretense of secrecy about the latter’s planned replacement. “What I have going on in air dominance is the AIM-260, or the JATM, which is to counter PL-15,” Genatempo said. “That’s an effort we have ongoing with Lockheed Martin that’s proceeding extremely fast.”

The AIM-260 is scheduled to begin flight-testing in 2021 and achieve initial operational capability in 2022, Genatempo said. It will debut first inside the main weapons bay of the Lockheed F-22 and the Navy’s Boeing F/A-18E/F, then migrate later to the Lockheed F-35. It shares similar dimensions to the AIM-120 but provides “significantly greater” range, Genatempo said, declining to elaborate. Beyond those details, information about the joint Air Force-Navy AIM-260 program remains tightly controlled. Asked for comment after Genatempo’s remarks, Lockheed referred all questions back to the Air Force. It is unclear how the AIM-260 achieves significantly greater range within a similar form factor as the AIM-120, nor is it known how the weapon is guided. Genatempo offered only that it flies at different speeds than the AIM-120 and uses no air-breathing propulsion such as the Meteor’s ramjet system.

Douglas Barrie, a senior fellow for military aerospace at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, speculates that such a missile could achieve additional range by using a dual-pulse motor with a timing-selectable second pulse or perhaps an exotic gel propellant. But the missile’s designers face a difficult challenge. “Getting a kinematic performance similar to the PL-15 but not using a rocket/ramjet is going to be interesting,” he says. The accelerated schedule, with a five-year span from contract award to first flight, also suggests the Air Force is taking an aggressive approach. “It looks racy, from what’s in the public domain,” Barrie says. “But then again, who knows what’s been going on in the classified realm?”...........

the Air Force has launched a new program called Golden Horde, with the goal of networking existing munitions for swarm attacks.

The Golden Horde concept arose from lessons that came out of the 2017 attack on Syrian airfields and military targets by about 100 BGM-109 Tomahawk cruise missiles and AGM-158B Joint Air-to-Surface Missiles. “The success of that mission was from a huge amount of mission planning, because each of those weapons was dropped at a certain time and had a preplanned flight,” Genatempo said. “There was no thinking or talking amongst themselves as to, ‘You know what? The first two of us that got here 4 min. earlier, we actually took out this target, so the two of you that were coming in behind us just to make sure, you can go to Target B.’ And within that 4-min. flight time, there would be time to adjust to go target B.”

The first Golden Horde demonstration flight is planned in 12 months.

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