These things tend to hang around........

Weapon performance remains a sensitive topic even after withdrawal from service so you won’t (or at least, shouldn’t) get much of an answer on here, certainly on trial data. What I will say is that assessing its effectiveness on live operations was very difficult: as a long-ranged and quite slow-acting missile it did its business well out of sight, and no-one wanted to hang around near air defence systems to see what it was up to. If no-one got shot down while an ALARM was in the air, was that because it scared the SAM operators into turning their radars off, or destroyed the radar, or simply because no-one would have been shot down anyway? A great imponderable. HARM was/is different in that regard because it did/does its business quickly (the clue is in the name...) and so is perhaps easier to correlate a shot with an outcome. Enough said I feel.

The 'loitering' capability under the 'chute really drove the design of the weapon. Getting a burnable chute out of the back of rocket motor was quite a trick. The warhead also had to be quite nasty to achieve effects from a missile that was designed not to directly hit the emitter.

Arguably its best feature was when used in tandem with HARM capable aircraft, giving the SAM crews quite a complicated picture. Add in the odd LO platform and some jamming, both stand-off and stand-in and the overall effect was rather good.

The worst feature, especially when not operating in a mixed package was the speed of the thing. More of a SARM than a HARM, to the point that it was easy to arrive over the target well before the missile you fired earlier.


As ever, no comments on the EW side as those elements live on even after the demise of the missile.