Pakistan allows US to inspect Harpoons

[aanshu001]

The next scandal will be " they painted the harpoon missile in Green and white which is violation of US law and our contract".

just love it

 

[Spring Onion]

do you know India has decided to take up Harpoon modification issue with US.

What after the NYT report proven wrong ? Can we sue this paper at any international court or body ?

 

[muse]

Jana


I'll make you a bet -- the US will come up with something else - Musharraf says turn the obstacle into opportunity -- how can Pakistan turn this into opportunity?

Remember this is a conflict among US analysts and US policy makers,

 

[mjnaushad]

But US was able to find WMDs in Iraq!!!!!

So if there is any hidden agenda behind this news, US will find a modified Harpoon in Pakistan very easily.

They might be coming with inspection results already printed and filed in their bags.

This seems to be another 'great' find by NYT, since Pakistan's goal post have been goaly less for some time. Scoring long range goals are quite easy.

He got point.

 

[Kaypa]

This geographical location has always had Mir Jafer and Mir Sadiq who have been betraying the nation. Unfortunately, now these Mirs are in power and can work as influencial agents for USA, well I stand corrected they are acting as influencial agents. They are letting these Americans do whatever they want to . Hummers,,,, blackwater, world biggest US Embassy, immigration free corridor for americans, etc etc. As it is said "Huvay tum dost jin kay dushman un ka asman kiyon ho"

 

[Skywalker]

This geographical location has always had Mir Jafer and Mir Sadiq who have been betraying the nation. Unfortunately, now these Mirs are in power and can work as influencial agents for USA, well I stand corrected they are acting as influencial agents. They are letting these Americans do whatever they want to . Hummers,,,, blackwater, world biggest US Embassy, immigration free corridor for americans, etc etc. As it is said "Huvay tum dost jin kay dushman un ka asman kiyon ho"

Your Mirs reminded me quite a few in Pakistan, to start with Mir Khalil ur rehman, Mir Shakeel Ur rehman, Mir Ibrahim ur rehman, Hamid Mir, Ayaz Mirs and the list goes on.

 

[Imran Khan]

let them see who we upgrade it may help them in future.lol

if we are clear then why we hide something let them see and waste there times in pasni jewani ormara bases.

 

[Penguin]

Washington DC (SPX) Jun 01, 2006
The Defense Security Cooperation Agency notified Congress of a possible Foreign Military Sale to Pakistan of HARPOON Block II Anti-ship Missiles as well as associated equipment and services. The total value, if all options are exercised, could be as high as $370 million.

FMS Pakistan HARPOON Block II Anti-ship Missiles

Harpoon Block II provides accurate long-range guidance for land and ship targets by incorporating the low-cost inertial measuring unit from the Boeing Joint Direct Attack Munition, or JDAM, program; and the software, mission computer, integrated Global Positioning System/Inertial Navigation System and the GPS antenna and receiver from the Standoff Land Attack Missile Expanded Response, or SLAM-ER.
Harpoon Block II is capable of executing both land-strike and anti-ship missions. To strike targets on land and ships in port, the missile uses GPS-aided inertial navigation to hit a designated target aimpoint. The 500-pound blast warhead delivers lethal firepower against a wide variety of land-based targets, including coastal defense sites, surface-to-air missile sites, exposed aircraft, port/industrial facilities and ships in port. For conventional anti-ship missions, such as open ocean or near-land, the GPS/INS improves midcourse guidance to the target area. The accurate navigation solution allows users to discriminate target ships from islands or other nearby land masses or ships. These Block II improvements maintain Harpoon's high hit probability even against ships very close to land.

The multi-mission Block II is deployable from all current Harpoon missile system platforms with either existing command and launch equipment or the new Advanced Harpoon Weapon Control System, or AHWCS.

Boeing: Integrated Defense Systems - Harpoon Home

Did Pakistan actually get Block II Harpoon? If so, there is no need to modify those in order to be able to attack land targets!

In June 2009 the U.S. accused Pakistan of illegally modifying older Harpoon missiles to strike land-based targets, presumably for use against India. A report to this effect appeared in the New York Times in August 2009, citing unnamed officials from the US administration and US Congress.[7][8][9] Pakistan denies this, and has reportedly offered to allow U.S. officials to inspect its Harpoon inventory.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Harpoon

If Pakistan did get Block II Harpoons and did modify older Harpoons (not Block II) then the problem is obvisously not the fact that these could be used to attack land targets, but rather the fact that the missiles were - from the US point of view - 'tampered with' i.e. that there was a violation of the user agreement between US and Pakistan.

 

[jawadqamar]

Debunking A Myth


India-based intellectuals, be they civilians dabbling in strategic affairs or even serving or retired armed services chiefs, have repeatedly demonstrated a remarkable consistency in making ludicrous and largely discredited claims about Pakistan’s military-industrial capabilities that seemingly tend to give the Pakistan Armed Forces a debilitating force projection superiority over their Indian counterparts. The latest such accusation to have surfaced concerns the alleged efforts by the Pakistan Navy to modify its ship-launched Boeing-built RGM-84A and submarine-launched UGM-84A Harpoon anti-ship cruise missiles (of 1984 vintage) into ship-launched 50nm-range dual-role anti-ship strike and land attack precision-guided missiles. True or false? Can such modifications be done covertly without any involvement by the guided-missile’s OEM?

The best and most convincing answer comes from none other than the OEM itself—Boeing Integrated Defense Systems, which had by the mid-1990s successfully modified the Harpoon into precision-guided land attack missile called SLAM-ER (standoff land attack missile-extended range), and had also developed the related Harpoon Shipboard Command Launch Control System and the AWW-14 data-link pod (this being for the air-launched variant of the SLAM-ER). The above slides clearly demonstrate what exactly were the modifications carried out by Boeing IDS on the basic Harpoon, and how this missile has since evolved into the SLAM-ER (which is now being offered to the Indian Air Force along with both the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet and F-16IN Super Viper medium multi-role combat aircraft). Taking the cue from the SLAM-ER, both MBDA and Israel Military Industries (IMI) have adopted the same optronics-based precision-guidance approach for their SCALP and Delilah air-/ship-/submarine-launched standoff land attack missiles (as has the Pakistan Air Force with the Ra’ad air-launched land attack cruise missile).

Consequently, it emerges from the above that for any Pakistani military-industrial entity to modify the Harpoon into a LACM, it would not only have to radically redesign the missile’s nose section, but will also have to develop a passive optronic sensor and integrate it with the missile’s inertial navigation system, develop a new Shipboard Command Launch Control System, and develop the airborne data-link pod so that the LACM can be provided with over-the-horizon targetting (OTHT) cues at its terminal cruise phase. Which means, while the LACM will have to be launched from a warship lurking dangerously close to a hostile coastline, a defenceless manned airborne platform (either fixed-wing or rotary-winged) too will have to be in the warship’s immediate vicinity for providing OTHT cues.

Given such daunting R & D challenges, wouldn’t it be much easier for Pakistan to acquire and deploy ground-/air-/ship-launched LACMs like the Babur and Ra’ad, both of which not only have much longer engagement envelopes, but also heavier warheads for guaranteeing assured target destruction? And if at all it is so easy to modify or even reverse-engineer anti-ship cruise missiles of 1980s vintage, then can someone explain why the DRDO’s labs (like the DRDL, GTRE, IRDE and DARE) have still been unable to reverse-engineer the decommissioned BAE Systems-built Sea Eagle anti-ship cruise missiles (whose performance parameters closely resembled those of the Harpoon A) that have now been decommissioned and are available for total strip-down and cloning? Why has the DRDO been unable to re-engineer the Sea Eagle into an unmanned high-speed target drone capable of subjecting the Indian Navy's Barak-1 and Kashtan-M close-in anti-missile defence systems to some pretty realistic threat simulation environments of the kind expected to be faced in wartime? Why does this operational requirement (for the drones) remain unfulfilled till this day? India’s civilian and military decision-makers—it thus seems—can bark galore but cannot bite.—Prasun K. Sengupta

 

[Zulfiqar]

Did Pakistan actually get Block II Harpoon? If so, there is no need to modify those in order to be able to attack land targets!

Yes, we got hold of hundreds of Block 2 Harpoons in the last few years.

 

[Super Falcon]

what is use of those missile if we cant use them against india screw americans and give all missile to china so they willl build similar harpoon and give us in less price

 

[Super Falcon]

The Obama administration has accused Pakistan of illegally modifying U.S.-made missiles to expand its ability to hit land-based targets, a charge promptly rejected by Pakistani Ambassador in Washington. Citing senior administration and Congressional officials, The New York Times made the accusation in a dispatch that also said the altered missiles posed a potential threat to India. The Times said the charge came in late June through an unpublicized diplomatic protest to Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani and other top Pakistani officials.

"The accusations are incorrect and based on wrong intelligence," Ambassador Husain Haqqani," while commenting on the Times' dispatch. "We will make sure that the US understands the correct picture and we will fight back periodic efforts to falsely blame Pakistan which remains a critical US ally in fighting terrorism," Ambassador Haqqani said, urging the American media to help Pakistan in its vitally important anti-terrorism efforts and desist from making false accusations.

"Instead of false accusations, US media should help Pakistan secure the help it needs to fight our common enemy viz; terrorism," he added. The accusation, made amid growing concerns about Pakistan's increasingly rapid conventional and nuclear weapons development, triggered a new round of U.S.-Pakistani tensions, the report added. "There's a concerted effort to get these guys to slow down," the newspaper quoted a senior administration official as saying.

"Their energies are misdirected," the official added. The accusation comes at a particularly delicate time, when the administration is asking Congress to approve $7.5 billion in aid to Pakistan over the next five years, the dispatch said. Washington, it added, is also pressing Pakistani military to focus its attentions on fighting the Taliban, rather than expanding its nuclear and conventional forces aimed at India.

A senior Pakistani official, who spoke to the Times on the condition of anonymity, also rejected the accusation, saying that the missile tested was developed by Pakistan, just as it had modified North Korean designs to build a range of land-based missiles that could strike India, according to the Times. He said that Pakistan had taken the unusual step of agreeing to allow American officials to inspect the country’s Harpoon inventory to prove that it had not violated the law, a step that administration officials praised. U.S. officials said the disputed weapon is a conventional one based on the Harpoon anti-ship missiles that were sold to Pakistan during the Reagan administration as a defensive weapon, the newspaper reported.

The accusation stems from U.S. intelligence agencies' detection of a "suspicious" missile test on April 23 which was never announced by the Pakistanis and which appeared to give it a new offensive weapon, the Times said. U.S. military and intelligence officials suspect Pakistan of modifying the Harpoon sold to them in the 1980s, which would violate the Arms Control Export Act.

"The focus of our concern is that this is a potential unauthorized modification of a maritime antiship defensive capability to an offensive land-attack missile," another senior administration official told the Times, speaking on condition of anonymity about classified information. "When we have concerns, we act aggressively," the official added. Pakistan denied the charge and said it developed the missile, the Times said. The Times said some experts were also skeptical of the American claims. Robert Hewson, editor of Jane’s Air-Launched Weapons, a yearbook and Web-based data service, said the Harpoon missile did not have the necessary range for a land-attack missile, which would lend credibility to Pakistani claims that they are developing their own new missile.

Moreover, he said, Pakistan already has more modern land-attack missiles that it developed itself or acquired from China. “They’re beyond the need to reverse-engineer old U.S. kit,” Hewson said in a telephone interview. “They’re more sophisticated than that.” Hewson said the ship-to-shore missile that Pakistan was testing was part of a concerted effort to develop an array of conventional missiles that could be fired from the air, land or sea to address India’s much more formidable conventional missile arsenal

 

[Penguin]

Yes, we got hold of hundreds of Block 2 Harpoons in the last few years.

Well, then there you have it. The hub hub is not about adding the landattack capability to old Harpoons because newer Block IIs already have this too. Therefore the problem is purely the independent modification by Pakistan of US manufactures missiles (which I suspect involved adding GPS and INS)

 

[Penguin]

what is use of those missile if we cant use them against india screw americans and give all missile to china so they willl build similar harpoon and give us in less price

I think you're missing the point: the US does not have a problem with the Harpoons it sold being used against india in their intended role i.e. anti-shipping. It even doesn have a problem with landattack capability per se (other wise Pakistan would not have recived Block II Harpoons). The US has a problem with Pakistan modifying US weaponry, probably in breach of agremeents.

 

[greatsequence]

All they want to know that is it Chinese of North Korean tech but its neither it was upgrades by ACW by our own engg.

Spot on now this makes sense.