The president of USA, Joe Bidenconfirmed this Thursday the delivery of the AGM-154 Joint Standoff Weapon o Joint Ranged Weapon (JSOW) a Ukraine as part of a new military assistance package. This includes a Presidential Withdrawal Authority (PDA, by which the president can draw equipment directly from military reserves for urgent shipment), valued at approximately $375 million.
This package covers a range of military equipmentincluding air-to-ground munitions, high-mobility artillery rocket systems (HIMARS), artillery munitions, anti-tank weapons, armored vehicles, and various support systems such as light weapons, patrol boats, and demolition equipment. It is about the sixty-sixth lot provided from Department of Defense inventories as of August 2021.
A key component of this assistance is the delivery of JSOW, long range precision ammunition with which Ukraine hopes to increase the effectiveness of its Air Force.
The AGM-154 JSOW is a precision glider bomb developed jointly by the Marine of the US and the Air Force. Entered service in December 1998 and is designed to attack a variety of ground targets from distances that keep the launching aircraft out of range of many air defense systems, minimizing exposure to enemy fire. The JSOW uses a gliding mechanism with deployable wings allowing it to attack targets such as parked aircraft, trucks, armored personnel carriers and surface-to-air missile sites.
The AGM-154 weapon uses a Inertial Navigation System (INS) combined with technology GPS for your guide, with the variant AGM-154C that incorporates infrared terminal guidance to improve target accuracy. The weapon can be launched from low altitudes with a range of 22 kilometers or from high, reaching up to 130 kilometers.
The development of JSOW began in the early 1990s. 1990 under the division of Texas Instruments Defense Electronics and Systems and the first flight test was carried out in April 1991. The program was taken over by Raytheon after Texas Instruments sold its defense division in January 1997. The JSOW entered operational service in January 1999 and has since been adopted by various armies.
Its modular design allows multiple variantseach tailored to specific mission requirements through different payload configurations. This modularity makes it easy to upgrade and integrate new technologies.ensuring that the JSOW remains operational and relevant. The dimensions of the weapon are 4.1 meters in length, a span of 2.7 meters and a weight that varies between 483 and 497 kilogramsdepending on the variant.
He AGM-154A It serves as a basic model, equipped with BLU-97/B Combined Effects Bomb submunitions for area suppression. He AGM-154B It was developed with BLU-108/B sensor-fuse submunitions for anti-armor roles, but was not acquired by the Navy. He AGM-154Calso known as the variant BROACHincorporates infrared terminal guidance to attack resistant structures.
The variant was also developed JSOW-ER to extend the range of the weapon. However, its production was abandoned in favor of other missile systems such as the AGM-158B JASSM-ER. The JSOW’s operational flexibility includes compatibility with a wide range of aircraft, including Navy fighters such as the F/A-18C/D and F/A-18E/Fand Air Force aircraft such as the F-16 Block 40/50/60, B-1B, B-2A, B-52H, F-15E and F-35A/Cas well as the JAS 39 Gripen.
AGM-154 has been deployed in various conflictsincluding Operation Desert Fox, the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and operations supporting Ukraine. Since its introduction, more than 400 units have been used.
Current JSOW operators include Australia, Canada, Finland, Greece, Morocco, the Netherlands, Poland, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Taiwan, Turkey, Ukraine, the United Arab Emirates and the United States. Ongoing updates, such as variants JSOW Block II and Block III (C-1)aim to improve their resistance to electronic countermeasures and their operational capabilities.