ST. LOUIS, 24 March 2011.Electronics contract manufacturing specialist LaBarge Inc. in St. Louis will continue providing rugged complex wiring harnesses for the Raytheon Tactical Tomahawk ship- and submarine-launched cruise missile under terms of a $4.5 million contract announced today from the Raytheon Co. Missile Systems segment in Tucson, Ariz.The Tomahawk missile has had a particularly high profile in the news lately, as U.S. forces launched 112 of these smart satellite-guided munitions worth as much as $168 million at Libya on the first day of military operations against that North African country on March 19. Those expended cruise missiles soon will need to be replaced in the U.S. weapons inventory.LaBarge (NYSE Amex: LB) will produce the cable harnesses for Tomahawk in the company's factories in Berryville, Ark., and Joplin, Mo., starting in May, and should be finished by July 2012. A cable or wiring harness is a string of cables or wires with appropriate connectors that move power or data. Cables are bound together for ease of installation and maintenance, often with cables and connectors bound together in a protective sleeve that helps safeguard crucial interconnects from shock, vibration, fire, and moisture.Tactical Tomahawk is a long-range, all-weather, subsonic cruise missile designed to attack land targets and large, hardened ships at sea. The jet engine-powered smart missile can carry a variety of explosive warheads, guidance systems, and other capabilities.
The latest version of Tactical Tomahawk has network-centric warfare-capabilities, in that it not only can use data from several sensors aboard aircraft, unmanned aerial vehicles, satellites, infantry soldiers, armored combat vehicles, and surface warships to locate and attack its target, but also can send data from its own sensors to these distributed sensors.
