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From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Re: ASRAAM (air to air missile)
Message-ID: <1991Jan24.041622.23721@cbnews.att.com>
Date: 24 Jan 91 04:16:22 GMT
References: <1991Jan22.015553.20458@cbnews.att.com>
Sender: military@cbnews.att.com (William B. Thacker)
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
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From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
>From: cem@cs.brown.edu (Charles E. Moylan)
>Does anyone know if the european ASRAAM (advanced short-range air-to-air
>missile) program is still in existence?   I had heard that it was canceled
>in favor of upgrading the AIM-9 Sidewinder.  Is this true?

Last I heard, the program was in fairly deep political trouble but had
not actually died yet.  The original notion was that Europe would develop
ASRAAM while the US developed AMRAAM, and each would buy the other's
product rather than duplicating the development effort.  This always
struck me as a stupid idea, actually, with Europe killing medium-range
missile concepts which looked promising as alternatives to the dubious
AMRAAM, in return for a nebulous hope that the US would buy ASRAAM someday.
The icing on the cake was when the Europeans basically put ASRAAM on the
back (very back) burner for half a decade or so, guaranteeing that it
would not be ready when the US was looking for a Sidewinder replacement.
Now the Europeans are starting to look seriously at alternatives to AMRAAM
again, and the US is looking at Sidewinder enhancements to fill the place
of the missing ASRAAM.  All that the stupid agreement accomplished, in the
end, was to forestall competition that might have greatly improved the
quality of air-combat missiles.
-- 
If the Space Shuttle was the answer,   | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
what was the question?                 |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry