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Future Cruise / Anti-Ship Weapon (FC/ASW) - Program

Defence Minister Harriett Baldwin and her French counterpart Laurent Collet-Billon signed an agreement 28 March 2017 to explore future missile technologies with MBDA. Signed during a visit by M. Collet-Billon to the Ministry of Defence, the agreement begins a three year concept phase to develop future long range weapons for the British and French Navies and Air Forces. Each country will contribute €50 million to this phase. The Future Cruise/Anti-Ship Weapon programme will look at options to replace and improve existing Naval and Air Force weapons systems in the next decade. Lasting up to three years, this will help to define the missile designs and reduce risks to inform decisions about the next stage of the programme. Alongside sharing costs, both sides will benefit from access to each other’s national technology expertise, trials and test facilities.

Minister of Defence Procurement Harriett Baldwin said: "Our relationship with France is strong and enduring. We have a long history of cooperation in defence and security with our European Ally. As demonstrated by having Europe’s largest defence budget, the UK is committed to European security and we will continue to collaborate on joint defence programmes across the continent. Today’s agreement will sustain 80 jobs in the UK."

Délégué Général pour l’Armement Laurent Collet-Billon said: "We are launching today a major new phase in our bilateral cooperation, by planning together a generation of missiles, successor to the Harpoon, SCALP and Storm Shadow. The FC/ASW (future cruise/anti-ship weapon) programme’s aim is to have by around 2030 a new generation of missiles. This future capability is strategic, industrially as well as operationally. This new programme will be the backbone of our “one complex weapon” initiative."

The agreement is a further example of joint work under the Lancaster House Treaty of 2010 and builds on UK and French similarities in missile capabilities and delivery dates, providing significant efficiencies and securing value for money for the taxpayer.

During the 2016 Amiens Summit, the UK and France formally confirmed their intent to launch this project within 12 months. This agreement, which allows the Direction Générale de l’Armement to place the contract with MBDA, illustrates the dynamic nature of UK-France strategic cooperation.

UK-French cooperation already covers a wide range of fields beyond the FC/ASW programme, including research emerging from the partnership on innovation and missile technologies (MCM-ITP), work to align our capability plans, development and production centred on the Future Air-to-Surface Guided Weapon (FASGW) and the mid-life update programme of the SCALP/Storm Shadow missile systems. This new project further strengthens MBDA’s industrial optimisation building on their new Centres of Excellence.

The United Kingdom and France have had a long and successful history of defence cooperation, particularly in the missile field. The Royal Navy was an early export customer for the Exocet anti-ship missile in the 1970s and the only foreign country to receive the most sophisticated version of the homing head. The Royal Navy’s first small helicopter-launched anti-ship missile, the AS12, was also French. At the heart of this increased cooperation is the Lancaster House Agreement between the UK and French Governments which was signed 02 November 2010. These agreements strengthened cooperation between our two countries in both capabilities and operations, helping to consolidate a defence relationship which, by its breadth and depth, has few equivalents anywhere.

For the Royal Navy to be an effective force its surface fleet must be properly equipped with a suite of offensive and defensive weapons. To date, this has included a specialist, heavyweight anti-ship missile capability, in the form of the Harpoon missile system. When Harpoon exits service in 2023, there will be a serious capability gap, until the potential entry into service of FC/ASW programme in 2030. This gap will not be adequately filled by the smaller and more lightweight anti-ship missiles that will be available from 2020 onwards on the Navy’s Wildcat helicopters.

Harpoon’s initial exit from service date was 2018 which, together with the gap between Sea Skua’s withdrawal from - and Sea Venom’s entry into - service, would have resulted in a two-year period where the Royal Navy had no specialist anti-ship missile capability at all, as well as an extended gap where there was no heavyweight anti-ship missile capability.

The extension of Harpoon’s lifespan until 2023 only partially alleviated this gap as the FC/ASW programme is not due to yield a heavyweight system until 2030. As things stand, from 2023 until 2030, the Royal Navy will be reliant on Helicopter-fired anti-ship missiles, submarine-launched torpedoes, and the guns on its frigates and destroyers.

There are a number of options available to the UK MoD for filling the anti-ship missile capability gap after 2023: these range from short-term, bridging ‘fixes’ that would be consistent with the FC/ASW programme to a longer-term replacement that could call into question the FC/ASW program.

The MoD mentioned the possibility of a “longer extension in service” for Harpoon beyond 2023. However, during their appearances before the joint inquiry on 11 July, both the then Minister for Defence Procurement, Guto Bebb MP, and Sir Simon Bollom conceded that such an extension “looks very challenging”, particularly due to the issues that Harpoon’s advanced age poses for its energetics, the propulsion system and the warhead. This is not to mention the concerns that already exist about Harpoon being an obsolete anti-ship missile platform in the contemporary operational environment.

In light of the above considerations, it may be reasonable for the MoD to procure an off-the-shelf anti-ship missile capability to bridge the gap after 2023. The MoD was clear that there were a number of options available to the UK which were being actively examined. Exploring these options, in addition to the concept phase work, was an important part of making sure that the MoD had a “coherent overview of all the options open to us”.

Possible off-the-shelf alternatives that could be considered by the MoD include the following:

1. Lockheed Martin’s Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM): the LRASM comes with both air and vertical canister launch capabilities, relies on onboard systems for target acquisition without the need for GPS navigation or external data-feeds and is able to defeat jamming and detection measures. It offers interoperability with the F-35. The LRASM will enter service for the US Air Force this year and the US Navy next year. Australia, the UK and Canada are reported to have expressed interest in the missile. Cost per unit is in the realm of $700,000–1,000,000.
2. Naval Strike Missile (NSM): the multi-role variant of this missile, jointly developed by Kongsberg and Raytheon, would be compatible with the F-35 and would offer lower costs than the LRASM or the latest Harpoon variant. According to Raytheon, the NSM is “proven, affordable—and available today. The Naval Strike Missile is a long-range, precision strike weapon that can find and destroy enemy ships at distances up to 100 nautical miles away”. The NSM’s lifespan extends until 2040.
3. RBS15 Mk3: produced by Saab, the RBS15 Mk3 is, according to Naval Technology, “packed with a range of high-end features, including sophisticated electronic counter-measures (ECM) and an advanced graphical user interface [ … ] it carries a heavy, high-explosive blast and pre-fragmented warhead over a range of around 134 nautical miles and at a speed of 0.9 mach”.
4. The MoD could seek to procure the Block II+ variant of Harpoon. The US Navy is due to introduce the Block II+ this year and it “offers greater reliability and survivability” than previous variants, including new GPS guidance and a new data link that offers “in-flight updates”, as well as improved target selectivity and “enhanced resistance to electronic countermeasures”.
5. Another alternative could be deploying the latest version of the Exocet MM40 Block 3 system. The Royal Navy operated Exocets until 2002 and according to Naval Technology, the Block 3 offers an increased range of 97 nautical miles and “a number of other enhancements and upgrades, including changes to its navigational system which now accepts GPS waypoints to enable it to use different angles of attack against naval targets and to provide a limited land-attack capability”.54 An upgraded Exocet model, the Block 3 C will soon be available to the French Navy and, according to Janes, offers “a new coherent active radio frequency (RF) seeker as the centrepiece of a ‘digitised’ guidance and navigation package” that should bring “significant improvements in target selectivity and electronic countermeasures performance”.
6. MBDA Italia’s Otomat MK2 Block IV was also listed among the available options to the UK.

MoD wanted a surface to surface anti-ship missile to fill the capability gap. However, there was not a funded line in the equipment plan for such a purchase and that it was therefore one of the MoD’s “aspirations” for the Modernising Defence Program. there were currently no missiles on the market that met the operational need the FC/ASW program was aiming to cover by 2030.

For MBDA, this program of deep and anti-ship strikes is an excellent example of a program that could attract wider international participation. Starting from a Franco-British scope, but the objective further down the line, having reached the right level of maturity, is to extend that programme to other European countries that have cruise missiles such as Sweden, Germany, Italy, Spain. It could well be that the FC/ASW is ultimately destined, for its deep strike capacity, to replace the SCALP EG operated by Italian forces, and the TAURUS KEPD 350 missile operated by the German, Swedish and Spanish forces.

Series manufacturing times might be spread over longer periods to maintain skills in the industry, and this might raise questions as to how relevant the weapon will be in the medium-term and whether its definition should remain unchanged when signs of obsolescence are emerging. Export potential is a key factor in reducing costs, ensuring the program’s economic balance. Anticipating the effects of the ITAR regulations and, more broadly, any potential hindrance to the export of these materials will be essential for the FC/ASW program.

Should the FC/ASW program not proceed after the concept phase concludes in 2020, either for technological or cost reasons, there could be significant consequences for UK-French cooperation and to the unique industrial partnership and skills bases that have emerged in both countries via MBDA. The strengthening of the Franco-British industrial and technological defence base, through the increasingly extensive integration of MBDA, has been one of the pillars of the Lancaster House agreement.