Pentagon Orders Thousands of Laser-Guided Rockets for $322 Million

BAE Systems has received a $322 million order to kick off a contract worth up to $1.7 billion for laser-guidance kits to go on 2.75-inch rockets the Air Force relies on for a wide range of combat missions.

The company announced the order Dec. 10, a little more than three months after the Pentagon announced in late August that it had reached a deal with BAE to produce five lots of the WGU-59 A/B Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System II.

The initlal $322 million order will produce “tens of thousands” of combat-proven laser-guided munitions for a five-year period, according to a BAE announcement.

The Navy is the lead service on the contract, but the APKWS guidance kits will be available for all services for upgrading unguided Hydra-70 rockets to semi-active laser-guided precision weapons, according to Sam.gov.

The original award announcement states that BAE is the “sole designer, developer, and manufacturer/supplier of the APKWS II and is the only contractor with the knowledge, experience, technical data, and computer software necessary to meet the government’s requirements.”

The APKWS guidance kit is compatible with new and existing inventories of rocket motors, warheads, and fuses and requires minimal training to use in the field, according to BAE.

The Air Force first used APKWS as an air-to-ground weapon on the F-15 Strike Eagle but then demonstrated the system could be used effectively in an air-to-air capacity on an F-16 Fighting Falcon in 2019.

More recently within the past year, the service has deployed the system on fighter aircraft in the Middle East to take out cheap drones in a cost-effective manner.

The Air Force now wants to use the versatile weapons system for targeting drone swarms from air bases and other ground positions. The service released a Nov. 19 request for information to identify firms that could build ground-based systems for using APKWS rockets against small Group 1 drones up to larger Group 3 systems.

It’s the service’s latest attempt to build an arsenal of weapons to defend air bases against a constantly evolving drone threat. The Air Force wants a wide-range of counter-drone technologies such as high-power microwave systems and low-cost missiles as alternatives to expending its expensive precision munitions on cheap unmanned aerial systems that can be easily replaced.

APWKS has already been used successfully as a ground-launched counter-drone weapon by Ukrainian forces to down one-way Russian attack drones. The laser-guided system costs less than $40,000 and has a per-shot cost of $24,900, making it much more cost-effective than expending AIM-9 air-to-air missiles that can cost more than $500,000 each.

BAE has produced APKWS laser-guidance kits for about 12 years at the firm’s manufacturing plants in Hudson, N.H. and Austin, Texas.