Independent Working Group Report: Missile Defense, the Space Relationship, and the Twenty-First Century. »»
September 8, 2008
IWG Report 2007
Independent Working Group Report: Missile Defense, the Space Relationship, and the Twenty-First Century. »»
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Taurus 350A/P
| Country: | Germany |
|---|---|
| Class: | ALCM |
| Target: | Land |
| Length: | 5.10 m |
| Launch Weight: | 1.00 kg |
| Payload: | Submunitions, 450 kg KEP |
| Propulsion: | Turbojet |
| Range: | 200.00 km |
| Guidance: | INS, GPS, TERCOM, IIR |
| Status: | Development |
| Exported: | Australia |
Details
The Taurus 350A/P is a short-range, air-launched, turbojet powered, air-to-surface cruise missile developed by Germany and Sweden. It was designed to penetrate air defense systems and to destroy hardened, stationary, and semi-stationary targets.
In the 1980s, the Germany company DASA (LFK, now part of EADS) began developing a family of aircraft submunition dispensers, known as the Dispenser Weapon System (DWS) 24. In 1985, DASA along with the Swedish company Bofors Missiles (now Saab Bofors Dynamics) adapted the DWS-24 for the Royal Swedish Air Force as the DWS-39. The missile was designed to be deployed on JAS-39 Gripen aircraft. In 1995, LFK and Bofors Missiles proposed a more powerful version of the DWS 39, known as the Kinetic Energy Penetrator and Destroyer (KEPD) 350. Two further variants were added in 1996, a lighter KEPD 150 with a range of 150 km and a MAW PDWS 2000 missile with a range of 100 km.
In 1998, the German Ministry of Defense proposed replacing the MAW PDWS 2000 with two new missiles, the Taurus 350A carrying submunitions with a range of 200 km, and the Taurus 350P carrying a penetration warhead with a range of 300 km. A joint company of DASA and Celsius (now Saab Bofors Dynamics) was formed under the name Taurus Systems GmbH to develop the Taurus 350A/P. The missiles are both 5.1 m in length, with a body width of 0.63 m, a height of 0.32 m, a wing span of 1.0 m, and launch weights of 1,090 kg (Taurus 350A) or 1,240 kg (Taurus 350P). Midcourse guidance is an inertial navigation system/GPS system with terrain contour matching (TERCOM) updates using the imaging infra-red (IIR) seeker.
The reported submunitions for the Taurus 350A are the MUSJAS 1/2, the STABO, and the SMArt-SEAD. The MUSJAS 1/2 submunition is used against lightly-armored targets and produces explosively-formed fragments. The STABO is an anti-runway submunition which carries a 16 kg high explosive warhead. The SMArt-SEAD submunition was developed from a 155 millimeter artillery shell submunition. It also has active and passive radars and an infrared sensor to locate armored vehicles and to attack them with a armor-piercing warhead.(1)
Footnotes
- Duncan Lennox, ed., Jane’s Strategic Weapons Systems 45 (Surrey: Jane’s Information Group, July 2006), pp. 63-66; GlobalSecurity.org, “KEPD 150 / KEPD 350 MAW Taurus,” available at http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/europe/taurus.htm, accessed on August 1, 2006; Robert Hewson, “Taurus KEPD 350 missile ready for service,” Jane’s Defence Weekly, May 26, 2004; Damian Kemp, “German KEPD 350 trials completion allows deliveries to begin,” Jane’s Defence Industry, December 1, 2005; Joris Janssen Lok, “Taurus Systems investigates future advanced KEPD 350 missile derivatives,” Jane’s International Defence Review, November 1, 2006.
