Tomahawk missile maker Raytheon Co on Monday announced plans to develop a new variant of Tomahawk cruise missile.
Raytheon Co. announced on its Twitter account that: “We are working with the U.S. Navy on a new seeker that would enable the Tomahawk cruise missile to strike moving targets at sea.”
Currently, the Tomahawk cruise missile can be launched from a ship or submarine and can fly into heavily defended airspace more than 1,000 miles away to conduct precise strikes on high-value targets with minimal collateral damage.
U.S. and allied militaries have used the highly accurate, GPS-enabled precision weapon more than 2,300 times in combat, and flight-tested it 550 times.
In April 2018, U.S. Navy warships and submarines launched 66 Tomahawk cruise missiles at Syrian chemical weapon facilities. A year prior, 59 Tomahawk missiles hit a Syrian airfield where a chemical attack was launched. A U.S. Navy destroyer fired five Tomahawk missiles into Yemen in 2016 to take out a coastal defense cruise missile site that had been targeting merchant and warships in the Gulf of Aden.
As the battlespace and needs of the warfighter evolve, Raytheon is planning to create new seeker for Tomahawk cruise missile that will hit moving targets at sea, in darkness and all kinds of weather.