The production ramp-up for Enforcer missiles – Enforcer Production Increase Campaign (EPIC) – has been proposed for funding within the European Commission’s ASAP programme.
The EPIC project aims to increase Enforcer production significantly and thus will contribute to the further enlargement of the series production of Enforcer missiles at MBDA in Schrobenhausen/Germany and at MBDA partner companies in Europe.
Eric Béranger, CEO of MBDA, declared:
“The ASAP EPIC project is a great opportunity to ramp up the Enforcer missile production, while making it more resilient and faster. Series production of the Enforcer is now well under way and the first deliveries to the German Armed Forces will follow this year. Also an export contract has been concluded. We are increasing the production of Enforcer missiles to meet customer demand for the years to come.”
MBDA, as the European market leader for missile systems, is investing heavily in its production capacities all over Europe.
ASAP EPIC makes a decisive contribution here and contributes significantly to European resilience and the sovereignty of our customers, their armed forces and their allies.
According to MBDA:
“The portable, shoulder-launched, lightweight, high-precision Enforcer is a fire-and-forget missile system with an operational range up to 2,000m. Due to its low weight, day and night passive operation and enclosed space firing capability, Enforcer provides a significant capability enhancement in mobile ground operations. With its unique features the Enforcer provides precision effects capabilities against the threat from lightly armoured static and moving targets, targets behind cover, and against targets at long range also in urban environments. The modular design of the Enforcer system enables a range of future development options, including a ‘family’ of Enforcer munitions for land, air and sea applications.”
I first read about the Enforcer a few years ago and it is one of a proposed family of weapons , but it must be made clear , that the version above is not an anti-tank weapon. I quote from an European Defence review article on the Enforcer from last OCT:
MBDA Germany Enforcer lightweight missile is ready for production and to generate new variants
It comes along the Akeron, Milan, Nlaw, Eryx tow, Hellfire, Spikes…
Well, it is good to have more modern equipments produced. But so many R&D dupplicate… Imagine just 2 teams doing it… we could have far larger stockpiles.
It does seem like reinventing the wheel. LMM is what came to mind looking at this, as it appears to have a similar target set. However, LMM is much longer ranged, much faster and is useful against fast targets, although it would be nice if it could be fire and forget.
AA
For the Stormer/RapidRanger end of LMM’s use, would radio command guidance work?
Looking at videos of tests, both LMM and StarStreak waste energy trying to stay on the straight beam line between the launcher and target. Having command guidance would mean that the missile had longer range as it could follow a ballistic arc and lead crossing targets.
Just possibly, as I don’t know, they might just do that for targets at their maximum range, however this might be limited by having to stay within the illuminator bracket?
The laser system as I understand it, is virtually unjammable, and the lasers are very low power in order not to trigger laser detectors. No doubt someone will correct me on that.
I would love to see Martlet launchers on our vessels to counter smaller targets, and up the missile count on the ships. A launcher something like the decoy dispenser shown recently would add 24 missiles to any ships inventory. Would a launcher like this be more manpower intensive than having a 40mm bofors?
AA