Description
The Weapon System
The Standoff Land Attack Missile - Expanded Response (SLAM-ER), an evolutionary upgrade to the combat-proven SLAM, is a day/night, adverse weather, over-the-horizon, precision strike missile. SLAM-ER extends the weapon system's combat effectiveness into the next century, providing an effective, long-range, precision strike option for both pre-planned and target-of-opportunity attack missions against land and ship targets.
SLAM-ER will be the first weapon to feature Automatic Target Acquisition, a revolutionary technological breakthrough which will automate and improve target acquisition in cluttered scenes, and overcome most countermeasures and environmentally degraded conditions.
When TSSAM was cancelled, SLAM-ER was approved for EMD. IPTs from the
program office and contractor maximized the use of COTS and NDI. Both
SLAM and SLAM-ER were developed within a five-year period. Benefits to
the fleet of this approach included reduced development time - (to 1/3 of the
current DoD average) and TOC costs due to commonality
across the AGM-84 family of weapons.
The SLAM-ER R-TOC approach is to build on the previous successes from
the program's development phase in which the use of commercial
off-the-shelf parts, an over-60% reduction of the parts count,
streamlining of documentation, use of performance specificiations,
contractor configuration control, and an incentive fee contract
resulted in reduced production costs and enhanced reliability. The
program has an inherent advantage in that there is extensive component
commonality with the predecessor SLAM and Harpoon missiles and the
program manager O&S reduction focus is across the entire family of
weapons and its support infrastructure. The focus of the SLAM-ER R-TOC
effort is to reduce TOC primarily in the production phase (which
accounts for the majority of system TOC) and
secondarily in O&S costs.
Production Status, Population, and Planned Life
The SLAM-ER is in production. The Program Manager proposed an
accelerated production rate for the system to reduce acquisition costs.
Initially, the annual procurement rate was reduced to 20% of the original plan, with an 83% increase in unit costs. But ultimately,
the FY03-05 procurement profile was increased to buy out the requirement by FY05, while procurement after FY06
has been zeroed. This results in $75.5M in procurement cost savings.
Prime contractor: The Boeing Company
Office of Primary Responsibility: Program Manager, Standoff Missile Systems (PMA-258), Naval Air Systems Command
R-TOC Focus Areas: (From USD (AT&L) memorandum dated May 10, 1999)
1. Reduced demand from weapon systems via reliability and maintainability improvements
- Design for reduced parts count
- Funding for a new data link pod (AN/AWW-13) was approved as an
Affordable Readiness Initiative. Trade studies are underway to
evaluate a Low Cost Weapons Data Terminal and an improved seeker.
This initiative will result in $11.2M in NAVICP working capital fund
costs, reduce fleet maintenance workload, and decreate pod failures
from >200 per year to <15 per year.
2. Reduced supply chain response times, leading to reduced spares, system support footprint, and depot needs
- Two level maintenance
- Boeing completed the first phase of the Navy "Pathways"
transformation pilot for Supplier Lean Enterprise. The result was a
10% reduction in cycle time for the SLAM-ER fuze. The overall
objective is a reduction in missile lead time to 52 weeks. Boeing
has been approved and funded for a follow-on effort, which will
involve 5 top dollar or lead-time suppliers.
- Missile Subsystem Test Set (MSTS) upgrade, to alleviate component obsolescence and reduce
O&S costs
3. Competitive sourcing of product support, leading to streamlining and overhead reductions
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