U.S. Army orders more of its 55-year-old anti-tank missile
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A missile that first destroyed tanks in the jungles of Vietnam more than five decades ago just landed another half-billion-dollar contract, and the Army plans to keep firing it well past the year 2050. The U.S. Army awarded Raytheon, the missile-making arm of aerospace giant RTX based in Tucson, Arizona, a $536 million modification to an existing contract covering full-rate production and engineering services for the TOW Weapon System, according to a Department of War contract announcement. The modification pushes the total cumulative value of the underlying contract to $750,818,274, work that will be performed at Raytheon's Tucson facility with an estimated completion date of Aug. 31, 2027. TOW stands for Tube-launched, Optically tracked, Wire-guided, a name that describes exactly how the missile originally worked when Hughes Aircraft Company developed it in the 1960s: an operator fires the missile from a launch tube while keeping his optical sight fixed on the target, and a thin wire trailing behind the missile carried steering commands from the launcher all the way to impact. The weapon entered U.S. military service in 1970, making it more than 55 years old, and the Army has said it expects TOW to remain in the American arsenal beyond 2050, a service life that would eventually stretch past 80 years for a single weapon system, an almost unheard-of run for military hardware...
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