Lockheed Martin’s Joint Air-To-Surface Standoff Missile (JASSM)

It is difficult to determine which is worse or more reckless: The December 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) which, bizarrely and incredibly, claimed that Iran had “halted” its nuclear weapons program — or the Bush administration’s decision, bizarre and incredible in itself, to publicize the NIE and thus deal a fatal blow to the administration’s own policy of trying to enlist the international community to impose meaningful economic and diplomatic sanctions on Iran. We know that the NIE was bizarre and incredible because its own authors could not run fast enough away from it. The U.S. intelligence community consists of a dozen or so agencies, some under the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), others under the Department of Defense. On 31 March the Los Angeles Times reported that CIA director Michael Hayden said “that he believes Iran is still pursuing a nuclear bomb, even though the U.S. intelligence community, including his own agency, reached a consensus judgment last year that the Islamic Republic had halted its nuclear weapons work in 2003.” On 15 April ABC News reported that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates “said he believes Iran is ‘hell bent’ on acquiring nuclear weapons.” The question which should be asked is: what were the subordinates of Hayden and Gates thinking about when they wrote the NIE? Iran cannot at the same time “halt” its nuclear weapons program and “still pursue a nuclear bomb” (Hayden) or be “‘hell bent’ on acquiring nuclear weapons” (Gates).

The administration’s incoherence has created a situation in which we are now faced with only two options: Either allow Iran to become a nuclear weapon state, something which will happen during late 2009 or during 2010, or use military force to disrupt the Iranian nuclear weapons program. If we consider a military option, we should note that Russia is providing Iran not only with nuclear technology which would allow Iran to develop plutonium-based nuclear weapons (the enriched uranium-based nuclear weapon program which has been under way in Iran for several years, is a combination of indigenous knowledge augmented by help from Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan and the North Koreans); the Russians have also provided Iran with the world’s most sophisticated air-defense systems, the deployment of which will be completed this summer. These systems will offer the Iranian nuclear weapon facilities a measure of protection not only from air attacks, but would also make it more difficult for U.S. cruise missiles to reach their targets. It is thus good to read that following a series of successful reliability characterization tests, Lockheed Martin received U.S. government approval to continue development and production of the Joint Air-To-Surface Standoff Missile (JASSM). During the recent tests, the stealthy stand-off cruise missile demonstrated its capabilities across a wide variety of targets — including hardened, underground bunkers and air defense systems.

JASSM is an autonomous, long-range, conventional, air-to-ground, precision stand-off missile designed to destroy high-value, well-defended, fixed and relocatable targets. It is integrated on the B-1, B-2, B-52, and F-16 aircraft. Future platforms include the F-15E, F-35, and RAAF F/A-18. A 2,000-pound class weapon with a penetrator/blast fragmentation warhead, JASSM cruises autonomously in adverse weather, day or night, using a state-of-the-art infrared seeker in addition to the anti-jam GPS to find a specific aimpoint on the target. Its stealthy airframe makes it extremely difficult to defeat. The recertification approval also paves the way for continued development of the longer range JASSM-ER system. The extended range variant has more than twice the range of the baseline missile. As a result, aircrews and their aircraft are kept well outside the lethal range of an enemy’s air defense systems. The company said that while still being compatible with the B-1, B-2, B-52, F-15, and F-16, JASSM-ER will maintain the same outer mold line, reliability, survivability and lethality of the baseline JASSM missile.