What Replaces the Navy’s Critical AQM-37 Aerial Target?

Since 1962, a substantial-looking air-launched missile called the AQM-37 Typhon has played roles replicating enemy air-to-air and air-to-surface threats. Though vital to training and system development operations worldwide, the U.S. stock of AQM-37s has run out. What’s in the wings?

Last month, USAF F-16s fired the last two of over 5,000 Typhons produced. They were expended in a test for the Army’s Integrated Fires Mission Command operations at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico.

The Navy has been the chief steward of the AQM-37 for the last six decades (the Army and Air Force have also employed small numbers) with the inventory managed by NAVAIR’s Aerial Targets Program Office (PMA-208) at Patuxent River Naval Air Station, Maryland.

Built by Beechcraft, and later Raytheon, variants of the AQM-37 (dubbed the “Typhon”) could fly at speeds of up to Mach 4. With such speed and the ability to reach altitudes up to 300,000 feet, Typhons were able to fly simulated ballistic missile profiles.

Thanks to a digital autopilot, a telemetry system for flight evaluation and a command/control system allowing lateral maneuvers for course correction as well as dives and pull-ups, the Typhon was a highly effective live simulation tool. The target missile provided weapons training, development and evaluation for NATO countries as well as the U.S.

Well known systems which the AQM-37 helped advance include short range air-to air missiles including the Air Intercept Missile (AIM-9) Sidewinder, ship-borne short range anti-aircraft missiles including the Sea Sparrow Missile (RIM-7) and a variety of ships equipped with AEGIS missile defense systems.

The final roles played by the Typhon included recent exercises in which F-16s from the Air Force’s 412th Test Wing launched seven AQM-37 targets to support testing of E-2D Advanced Hawkeye sensors and F-35 Lightning II capabilities at Navy Exercise Gray Flag at the Point Mugu Sea Range. Though largely unheralded, these capped a long career in which the Typhon played a highly important role in U.S. fires and sensors development.

PMA-208 program manager, Don Blottenberger, acknowledged the importance of the AQM-37 but said its final chapter, “provides us the opportunity to start and sustain new chapters with more advanced technology and capabilities that closer resemble the threats we face.”

What advanced technology and capabilities the Navy/DoD will replace the AQM-37 with aren’t clear. It would be logical to surmise that along with existing alternative subsonic and supersonic test missiles, interest in missiles capable of simulating hypersonic threats would be high.

Last year, Lockheed MartinLMT
opened a new “smart” factory in Alabama where the Air Force’s AGM-183A Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW) will be manufactured, along with hypersonic systems for the Army and Navy. The site will also be used to build the Army’s Long Range Hypersonic Weapon and the Navy’s Conventional Prompt Strike missile.

Interestingly, the two systems have major components in common, including the hypersonic glide body vehicle itself. The Air Force was also a partner on that project (called the Hypersonic Conventional Strike Weapon), a fact which could suggest the possibility that the common hypersonic glide body vehicle could be semi-cost efficiently developed as a hypersonic test round a la AQM-37.

A spokesperson for PMA-208 suggested that the Navy will use a mix of existing target drone missiles to fill the gap left by exhaustion of the Typhon inventory. Northrop Grumman’sNOC
GQM-163 Coyote will likely be one. Designed as a non-recoverable sea-skimming supersonic target meant to simulate anti-ship cruise missiles, it can also perform as a diving target with a maximum altitude of 52,000 feet.

The diving portion of the surface-launched Coyote’s flight trajectory could be useful in simulating the terminal phase of cruise missile threats given its speed of Mach 3.8 in this phase of flight. Its low altitude performance at Mach 2.8 when sea-skimming makes it a challenging anti-ship missile simulator but without the air-launch capability of the AQM-37 it represents a smaller subset of the threat.

Northrop Grumman was recently awarded a Navy contract to procure 28 additional GQM-163s, which would indicate anticipated use as a follow-on to the Typhon. Theoretically, de-contented versions of existing air to air missiles like Raytheon’s AIM-120 Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile (AMRAAM) or shorter range, triple threat (air-air, surface attack, surface launch) AIM-9X Sidewinder could simulate the air to air threat.

What the Air Force’s plans for its emerging Modular Advanced Missile beyond combat employment are, are unknown. However, its rumored capability to integrate different propulsion systems and warhead/seeker payloads might make it a highly flexible test asset.

But with the last two AQM-37s having fired from the rails of an F-16 wing pylon the Navy acknowledges there currently is no direct replacement for it. NAVAIR has also publicly acknowledged that alternative supersonic targets like GQM-163 “are capable of fulfilling a separate limited subset of [AQM-37s] capability.”

At the same time, NAVAIR says there is not an anticipated gap in fleet training without AQM-37s. For the sake of future missile and sensor development as well as threat-defeat training, Americans should hope not.