Death From Above (Or Just Down The Block)

The March of Technology: Two birds w/ one mini-missile.

Raytheon’s new Pike laser-guided missile measures just 17 inches long,
1.5 inches wide and weighs less than 1.7 pounds. (Raytheon)

“What’s enabled this is the miniaturization of electronics,” James R. “J.R.” Smith, director of advanced land warfare systems at Raytheon’s missile systems unit in Tucson, Arizona, said during an interview with Military​.com.

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“A lot of what our Special Forces teams are dealing with when they’re engaging someone at range right now … they’re sitting there and they’re using a .50-caliber machine gun or firing rocket-propelled grenades, they’re not hitting the target and they’re being out-shot by a lot of these bad guys,” Smith said. “So how do they deal with that now?

“They pull out a Javelin, which is a pretty expensive weapon,” he said. “Whereas you could take one of these. I guarantee you this will be a tiny fraction of the cost of a Javelin.” The Javelin is made by Raytheon and Lockheed Martin Corp. And while the Pike will have less stopping power than the Javelin, it will feature a blast-fragmentation warhead sufficient for taking out two people behind a wall, he added.

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“It sees the reflection of laser energy off the target,” he said. “It’s looking for that laser energy. As it hits its apogee and it starts coming downhill, it will see its laser spot … You don’t even have to start by lasing. You can launch it, just as long as you get the laser on it before it hits its apogee and starts coming down. For a long shot like that, you could probably lase 15 seconds after launch.”

An M203 launcher beneath an M4 rifle would need to be modified to accept the round, Smith said. “The ones that are underneath the M4 carbines now, they can’t swing out far enough to slide it in,” he said. “It only sticks out so far. So they would have to modify that.”

An official with Raytheon shows off a model of the Pike missile Oct. 12, 2015,
during the AUSA conference in Washington, D.C. (Brendan McGarry/Military .com)

Any estimates on when these will make their way to police dep'ts. nation-wide?