Tomahawk Uses On-Board Camera for Target

by Kris Osborn

Send it to a command center and then loiter until instructed to destroy that target, Raytheon officials told Scout Warrior.

The technology was used in a test-firing of a Tomahawk recently launched off a Navy surface ship off the coast of California, Chris Sprinkle, Raytheon Tomahawk program manager, told Scout Warrior in an interview.

“We are taking advantage of the capability that is already in the weapon. It took a picture of a target area and sent it to a controller. The controller selected the target out of the photo and gave those coordinates to the weapon,” Sprinkle said.

During the Navy-Raytheon test-firing, photos from the missile were sent from the ocean off the Southern California coast to a command center all the way in Bahrain in the Middle East, Sprinkle explained.

“Controllers at the 5th fleet in Bahrain were controlling a large number of Tomahawks,” he added.

The weapon used its data-link to send photos to the command center while the Tomahawk loitered near a potential target, Sprinkle said. The Tomahawk was used to destroy a mobile missile threat during the test, Raytheon officials said.

“We flew a Tomahawk over the island and took a picture at a specific point to say is there a target there. That information was sent back via bi-directional data link to a controller in Bahrain. They evaluated and said yes there is a target. They processed the coordinates for that target and passed those coordinates back to the weapon,” Sprinkle explained.