Long Range Non Penetrator (lrnp)
Interesting bit in one of today's Sunday chip wrappers. It seems that a feasibility study is being carried out on a 'bomb truck' - a long range aeroplane which will launch Storm Shadow etc from extended range. In other words, it wouldn't need to penetrate enemy defences in order to launch stand-off weapons. Hence the acronym LRNP.
Types being considered are, apparently, A400M, C17, A330 and....C130. This seems like the old 'Dumb aircraft, clever weapon' idea - but it would obviously be much cheaper to modify a big aircraft to carry long-range stand-off weapons than to buy a fleet of B2s.
Of course you couldn't then do clever things like the rapid repsonse and re-targetting so publicly revealed when a B1B took out Saddam (perhaps) half-way through the fish course in a Baghdad nosh house - unless, that is, having launched your stand-off weapons you could employ over-the air re-targetting?
The other advantage is that such an aeroplane needn't be single-role. Your A400M could fly as a trash-hauler one day, move grunts around on another - and then launch stand-off weapons on yet another. No need for targetting radar, self-defense suites, etc - just a 'smart' remote targetting team and, of course, a weapon launching system. Not quite sure how that would be achieved - para-extracted or pylon mounted, perhaps? Presumably when A400M was being considered as a MPA replacement in its earlier FLA days, some study work was carried out regarding the carriage and launch of weapons?