Joe Mancini, the missile’s sensor project manager at BAE Systems, explained to Popular Mechanics, explained LRASM does things differently. Instead of using an active radar system to locate its targets, LRASM uses a passive sensor to sniff out and home in. LRASM doesn’t emit any electromagnetic signals that would allow the enemy to detect it ahead of time. Instead, the missile turns the tables by homing in on enemy shipboard radars.
Imagine two people playing tag in a dark room where the person who is 'it' is empty-handed, but his opponent has a flashlight. In order to see the person who is 'it,' the defender has to turn on his flashlight. After all, he can’t defend against what he can’t see. The trick is that when the flashlight is on, 'it' has a guiding light to aim for.
This puts the enemy commander in an impossible position: As long as he wants to defend himself, he must keep his radars on and in doing so, feed LRASM the data to find him. This will even work in poor weather and against ships with stealthy anti-radar shaping, as the missile doesn’t rely on radar to find its target.
LRASM’s guidance system is based upon so-called
electronics support measures(ESM) equipment originally made for the F-22 Raptor, F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, and B-2 Spirit bomber, and the equipment went through an extensive miniaturization effort to fit it into a guided missile. ESM collects and analyzes enemy electromagnetic signals, such as radar broadcasts, to identify and help counter them. LRASM uses this equipment to sort out all of the electromagnetic noise, identify the unique radar signals of its target, and home in for the kill.
LRASM’s wide angle “floodlight” antenna can scan a wider arc in front of the missile for enemy radar emissions than radar can, reducing the area of uncertainty problem. The missile is smart enough, via artificial intelligence, to detect new threats in its flight path, classify them, and fly around them. Once it gets close enough to, say, an enemy task force center around an aircraft carrier, it can compare the ships in front of it to an onboard library of enemy ships, making sure it strikes an aircraft carrier and not a frigate. It can even strike a certain part of a ship, such as the aircraft carrier’s island or a destroyer’s missile magazine, to do maximum damage.
In addition to its guidance capability, LRASM has a range in excess of 200 miles, or three times as long as the older Harpoon missile. It’s also built with low-observable technologies, making itself harder to detect via radar. The 1,000 blast fragmentation warhead is twice the size of Harpoon’s, and a single missile would likely cripple a 9,000-ton destroyer-sized ship.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/mi...anti-ship-missile-targeting-system-explained/
As usual, you display your ignorance. LRASM doesn’t emit electromagnetic signals. When Chinese ships turn on their radar in its feeble attempt to locate LRASMS, that’s just a homing beacon for the LRASM. Then using its advanced AI capabilities, it will fly a path of least resistance and strike the most vulnerable part of your ships and cripple it with its huge warhead. China can’t detect LRASM because it doesn’t emit EM signals, and it’s airframe emits almost no infrared signature and flys low to the sea.
As I said before, when the US launches 200 LRASMS in a multi axial attack on the PLA, China will wish it had never tangled with the US military. You are sitting ducks.
