MBDA has announced that it has secured additional funding from the Ministry of Defence (MOD) to expedite the development of the SPEAR-EW missile.
SPEAR-EW is crafted to confound and neutralise enemy air defence. Its role is not only protective – safeguarding allied forces – but also serves as a substantial force enhancer.
This Rapid Design Phase funding will hasten SPEAR-EW’s developmental phase, refining its primary sub-systems and enabling a comprehensive mission and planning assessment.
Chris Allam, the Managing Director of MBDA UK, shared his views: “SPEAR-EW will be a true game-changer for the suppression and defeat of enemy air defences. As we have seen lately, air defence networks are exceptionally hard to operate against with today’s toolkit: SPEAR-EW is the key that will enable allied air forces to unlock this challenge and gain air superiority.”
Dean Pask, Spear Senior Responsible Owner at the MOD, affirmed the institution’s dedication: “By embracing collaborative partnering, agile methods, and strategic technology, we are steadfastly dedicated to ensuring that our front line commands receive critical capabilities in the most effective and efficient manner possible.”
Leonardo, a significant player in the project, is in charge of crafting the weapon’s electronic warfare payload, capitalising on the company’s Digital Radio Frequency Memory (DRFM) technology. This technology has been trialled and demonstrated its efficiency and will power SPEAR-EW’s advanced sensing and electronic assault features. With SPEAR-EW, operators can jam enemy radar systems and employ subtler electronic warfare tactics, such as crafting decoy targets to divert threat systems away from crewed aircraft or effectors.
Highlighting the contribution of Leonardo UK, Iain Bancroft, SVP Electronic Warfare, remarked: “SPEAR-EW will incorporate a world-class electronic warfare payload, designed and manufactured here in Luton, UK. Based on our experience providing on-board jamming capabilities for the Eurofighter Typhoon and, more recently, off-board jamming in the form of our BriteCloud expendable active decoy, our technology can reliably beat current threats while remaining adaptable for the threats of the future.”
Does this self destruct to stop getting into enemy hands? Lovely bit of kit
If we ever need to use this, the objective will be to sever all the enemy’s limbs, including the hands.
This was the first thought that popped into my head as well.
No, that would introduce complications in handling and storage. Plus EM…
All that can be behind this acceleration of this EW Spear development is lessons being learned from the Ukraine war. Clearly another gap in our capabilities.
It’s not a gap, we never had such a capability before, no one has. It’s designed to defeat S400, which has shown its ineffectiveness in Ukraine.
US has the AGM88G AARGM-ER. Its successor SiAW is under development and under contract.
SPEAR-EW is not an anti-radiation strike missile like HARM though, it’s much more similar to MALD (with enhanced EW capability). It’s likely broadly comparable to the updated MALD-X the Americans are developing.
Completely different weapon, AGM88 is an anti radiation missile, SPEAR 3 is a stand in jammer, it’s US equivalent is MALD J or MALD (N)
S400 is a over priced useless piece of kit. The Israelis have been running rings around it in Syria for years.
It’s only effective against distinctly 3rd-4th gen aircraft. Not able to target a stealth aircraft like F22 or F35s until they’ve already shot off SEAD or got munitions on their way to blow it to kingdom come.
The weapons in this article should ensure RAFs ability to suppress air defences for years to come. It’s a cheap man’s electronic warfare Eurofighter in essence.
Didn’t we have similar capability with ALARM missile until 2013?
Not specifically for S400s, but for SEAD/DEAD?
We did but it needed a very expensive MLU so the MoD ditched it. It would have also required a very expensive integration effort to add it to Typhoon.
Truth is if we receive Spear and Spear-EW in the next few years the MoD will have done the right thing to ditch it….
In reading this article, I’m curious how effective the DASS on our Typhoons is against the S300/400 family of SAMs. By all accounts, the DASS on the RAF Typhoon is the best of any Typhoon operating nation out there.
Even with DASS, there always seemed to be an air of invincibility about the S300 and especially the S400 and they were to be avoided at all costs.
Understanding operational security, I am just trying to ascertain what the truth really is and how confident a Typhoon pilot could expect to be tasked with flying through heavily contested airspace.
Certainly Ukrainian Storm Shadow strikes on Crimea must have brought their Su-24s within range of the S400 systems on the peninsula and yet they have been able to penetrate it repeatedly and to great effect with low observable cruise missiles. Whether they could get away with flying ‘through’ such an area is another matter – I suspect without a preceding SEAD mission it would be near suicidal, hence the F35.
Would not want to try it in a typhoon but then that’s why we have storm shadow, so you don’t need to. F35 with SPEAR should mop up most GBAD in first few days while typhoon strikes deep strategic targets with SS.
Experience from Ukraine suggests S400 not all that, praetorian DASS is an amazing system as it can actively jam a missile and deploy a radar decoy simultaneously. Anyones guess how well it would do against S400 in actual combat but I would not he surprised if a typhoon could survive an engagement with an s400. Typhoon can launch two storm shadows outside s400 engagement range as well which can easily take out an s400 battery without troubling the DASS.
Not sure the S400 is useless or Ukraine has been very cunning in the way its attacked it. They were able to sink the Moskva using drones to distract from the Neptunes approaching as an example. There’s likely an element of Russian arrogance also, therefore not taking threats seriously.
A key weakness of S400, exposed by Turkey (who purchased S400 systems) is that it has very poor low altitude detection, such that a low altitude threat is not tracked until it’s too late to respond. This may partly explain Ukraine’s success with Storm Shadow, where a combination of daring low flying and Storm Shadow’s LO and very low altitude flight path are unable to be effectively detected by S400. But I’ve also seen a video of Pantsir attempting to intercept Storm Shadow, where the track goes completely haywire after lock, causing the interceptor to veer off target, so it’s… Read more »
Excellent, but SPEAR 3 isn’t expected to enter service for five years, are we likely to see this any sooner?
I would imagine that it will be dependent on S3-EW being fitted to Typhoons wouldn’t it?
Currently S3 is only slated for use on our F35’s and not Typhoons. Of course, things might well change further down the line.
MoD have told the Defence Committee that Spear will be on Typhoon….as it leans heavily on Brimstone tech it shouldn’t be as hard as you’d expect.
There are few comments below that have a few misconception over what SPEAR-EW is or does. So to clarify: The RAF at one point operated the ALARM (air launched anti-radiation missile). This like the US made HARM (high speed anti-radiation missile), was used to destroy enemy air defences (DEAD). It had a pretty substantial warhead, that exploded radially, thereby damaging more supporting systems rather than just the radar. Both the early HARM and ALARM at the time did not have access to GPS or miniature inertia measurement units (IMU). Which meant that if a radar detected that it was under… Read more »
Thanks for that. EW is somewhat of a mysterious dark art for a lot of people.
Only snag I can see in that is the S3-EW does not have the range to accompany storm shadow. Of course I am basing that off the range figures given for S3, which may be lower.
Fascinating topic though.
Spear (NOT SPEAR 3, thats the MoD Programme name….i.e. we don’t call Storm Shadow SPEAR 4….) has a range of at least 120nm. Spear-EW will be more like 300nm as it can use the space occupied by the warhead for additional fuel.
The early models of HARM obviously didn’t have GPS. But they did have the ability to continue engaging a target that had shut down its radar. This was a specific improvement over the preceding Shrike missile which when it lost lock was useless. HARM, like the enormous, Standard ARM would continue the engagement. The issue was that its accuracy would progressively degrade the further it was from the target when it lost lock to the point where it became moot as there was no way the warhead would have an effect due to the CEP. Later versions included GPS that… Read more »
With radar receivers. there is no direct way to determine range from the transmitter. As all the receiver can use is the received signal strength. Which depending on the type of radar and the waveform it uses can give misleading assumptions. It can work out the transmitters direction by using a pair of dipole antenna. By assessing which antenna receives the stronger signal. ALARM could get a rough idea to the range of the target by doing a weave towards the target. Basically triangulating the distance from an extreme left or right etc. I can’t remember if HARM does something… Read more »
HARM definitely had/has the ability from the earliest models of ‘memorising’ the target location to home if the emitter was shut down. Obviously it very much depends when the emitter was shut down as to how accurate it was. I believe MoD and MBDA were talking about the AESA seeker head on JNAAM. However that will just be a test programme now rather than production. Dual seeker’s are already out there. The Israeli Stunner uses radar and IR, some US SM-2 missile use radar and IR and the UK’s VSRAAM proposal from years ago used a dolphin nosed dual seeker… Read more »
Surely a more persistent craft is needed?