From Defense Tech, way to bury the lede:
The U.S. Navy’s variant of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter recently launched its first 1,000-pound GPS-guided bomb known as the Joint Standoff Weapon, or JSOW.
The Lockheed Martin Corp.-made F-35C conducted the exercise March 23 at Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland, according to a statement released Thursday from the F-35 program office.
Well, eventually, the guys at Pax are going to be dropping a whole lot of different weapons, different ways, to certify the F-35C to carry the full array of weapons. But bombs do weird things in the boundary air around a jet, especially when dropped from bomb bays, so you have to test for separation a lot.
No, the real news in the article is this:
The latest version of the technology, known as the JSOW C-1, adds a weapon datalink radio and modified seeker software for anti-surface warfare operations. The newer version is the world’s first network-enabled weapon with a range of more than 100 kilometers (62 miles), according to its manufacturer.
Much at the land attack variant of the Tomahawk missile has demonstrated an anti-surface warfare capability via a “synthetic” seeker by updating target location via data link, JSOW will also be gaining this capability. And just about anything that increases the number of different types of weapons the Navy can use in the anti-surface role is a good thing.
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