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From: garyb@hcx1.ssd.csd.harris.com (Gary Barton)
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Tomahawks
Message-ID: <1991Jan18.005043.9622@cbnews.att.com>
Date: 18 Jan 91 00:50:43 GMT
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From: garyb@hcx1.ssd.csd.harris.com (Gary Barton)
Watching the news last night, I became was fascinated by so called
"experts" comments on the accuracy of the Tomahawk cruise missle.
Some supplied statistics such as CEP radius, range, speed, etc.
However, this only wet my appetite for more information.

Some questions to those in the know:

1) What is the effective payload of the missle at strike distances of
several hundred miles?  What types of payloads can these things deliver?

2) Their guidance systems are reportedly visually keyed using a
complicated mission planning system to identify the landmarks along
the intended flight path, and evetually the target itself.  Where does
the information used to program these flight paths come from?  I would
expect that most satellite images would be two dimensional in nature
and would not be terribly suitable for programming of this sort weapon
by themselves.  However, if these images were bound to some sort of
elevation/contour map of sufficient resolution, I would expect we
could generate a reasonable mission preview.  Is U.S. satellite
technology so good that we can construct a 3-d image of the mission
plan with resolutions to a few feet, and do so fast enough to make
these weapons useful in a changing battlefield, or am I totally off
base as to how this system works.

3) Do the Iraqi's (for matter any nation) have defenses capable of
stopping an inbound cruise missle.  I recall a discussion of the navy
cruise missle defnse systems, but I speaking about land based
defenses.  It appears that the speed of these things is not so fast
that traditional SAMs and other antiaircraft defense might stand a
chance against them (even though they are a much smaller target than
say and F-15).  Are these missles equipped with any SAM
countermeasures (eg chaff, flares, ECM, etc) ?


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| Gary Barton                    | System Software Development      |
| Lead Engineer			 | Harris Computer Systems Division |
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