For Star subscribers: Local officials are confident in the long-term future of the Tucson-made AMRAAM despite efforts to replace or supplement it with new weapons.
David Wichner For more than three decades, Raytheon’s factory in Tucson has produced the main long-range air combat missile, the Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile or AMRAAM, for U.S. and allied air forces.
People are also reading… “It definitely is not the missile that I started out with,” Thayer said. “If we go back to the original missile, it was designed to meet a certain performance specification and beat a certain threat. The threat has evolved over the last three decades, obviously." The AMRAAM, which costs about $1 million per copy, has long been standard equipment for U.S. Air Force and Navy fighters and is in use by 42 allied nations, often paired with Raytheon's shorter-range, heat-seeking AIM-9 Sidewinder missile.
The AMRAAM scored its first intercept in combat in 1992, when a U.S. F-16 fighter used one to down an Iraqi MiG-25 that had violated the no-fly zone the U.S. and its coalition partners enforced over Iraq at the time. Overall, the AMRAAM has been credited with 16 aircraft"kills" by U.S. and allied forces over Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo, India and Syria.
New missilesMeanwhile, the Pentagon is moving ahead with the development of new air-to-air missiles to meet a perceived threat from China, which has reportedly developed missiles with longer range than the AMRAAM as well as advanced radar-jamming technology. In December, Raytheon was awarded a $21 million Air Force contract to develop critical subsystem technologies for two new air-combat weapons, called the Extended Range Air-to-Air Missile and Compact Air-to-Air Missile systems.
”The Air Force's basic approach to air warfare is to use radar to see first and fire first, which requires a beyond visual-range-missile that can operate independently of the aircraft launching it, hence the phrase, ‘fire and forget,’” said Loren Thompson, chief operating officer of the Lexington Institute, a Virginia-based think tank supported by Raytheon and other defense contractors.
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