<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" Last Friday, Raytheon scored a Navy contract worth more than $12.8 million to create a new warhead for the Tomahawk missile. Program officials with the company say the workhorse cruise missile will be fit with a warhead that can crack hardened targets and that could turn the Tomahawk into an intelligent ship-killer. Currently, the Tomahawk missile is fixed with a 1000-pound explosive that sprays fragments, an ideal configuration to destroy soft land targets, such as stationary infantry formations or unprotected buildings. But to take on a bunker or other shielded structures, the missile needs to have a two-stage warhead. The Tomahawk will use a shaped charge to destroy any armor, such as the concrete roof of a buried bunker or the thick steel bulkhead of a ship, allowing a second explosive behind to enter and detonate in the vulnerable interior. It will be effective for heavily fortified still or slow-moving targets. But the missile needs to be smarter to target moving enemy ships that are operating along crowded shorelines or close to civilian fleets. Using a Navy-funded study conducted at Johns Hopkins&amp;#039; Applied Physics Lab, Raytheon identified other upgrades it wants to make to transform the Tomahawk into a ship-killer: Advanced EASA radar to help the missile find targets, and new sensors that would enable the missile to discriminate targets from civilian ships by scanning radio and radar output. Tomahawks currently can be reprogrammed in flight, but will need more powerful radar and other sensors to find the right targets, yet &amp;quot;not so strong that they would give away the missile&amp;#039;s position before it&amp;#039;s too late,&amp;quot; says Everett Tackett, Raytheon&amp;#039;s business development manager for the cruise missile. The upgraded system will be the same size, so the tubes in submarines or launchers on the ships will not need to be changed. Raytheon expects to complete work on a demonstrator prototype by early 2012. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a4415/4325051/>