ALCM, SLCM And GLCM

By 1972, constraints placed on ballistic missiles by the SALT I treaty prompted U.S. nuclear strategists to think again about using cruise missiles. There was also concern over Soviet advances in antiship cruise missile technology, and in Vietnam remotely piloted vehicles had demonstrated considerable reliability in gathering intelligence information over previously inaccessible, highly defended areas. Improvements in electronics—in particular, microcircuits, solid-state memory, and computer processing—presented inexpensive, lightweight, and highly reliable methods of solving the persistent problems of guidance and control. Perhaps most important, terrain contour mapping, or Tercom, techniques, derived from the earlier Atran, offered excellent en route and terminal-area accuracy.
Tercom used a radar or photographic image from which a digitalized contour map was produced. At selected points in the flight known as Tercom checkpoints, the guidance system would match a radar image of the missile's current position with the programmed digital image, making corrections to the missile's flight path in order to place it on the correct course. Between Tercom checkpoints, the missile would be guided by an advanced inertial system; this would eliminate the need for constant radar emissions, which would make electronic detection extremely difficult. As the flight progressed, the size of the radar map would be reduced, improving accuracy. In practice, Tercom brought the CEP of modern cruise missiles down to less than 150 feet (see Figure 1).
Improvements in engine design also made cruise missiles more practical. In 1967 the Williams International Corporation produced a small turbofan engine (12 inches in diameter, 24 inches long) that weighed less than 70 pounds and produced more than 400 pounds of thrust. New fuel mixtures offered more than 30-percent increases in fuel energy, which translated directly into extended range.
By the end of the Vietnam War, both the U.S. Navy and Air Force had cruise missile projects under way. At 19 feet three inches, the navy's sea-launched cruise missile (SLCM; eventually designated the Tomahawk) was 30 inches shorter than the air force's air-launched cruise missile (ALCM), but system components were quite similar and often from the same manufacturer (both missiles used the Williams engine and the McDonnell Douglas Corporation's Tercom). The Boeing Company produced the ALCM, while the General Dynamics Corporation produced the SLCM as well as the ground-launched cruise missile, or GLCM. The SLCM and GLCM were essentially the same configuration, differing only in their basing mode. The GLCM was designed to be launched from wheeled transporter-erector-launchers, while the SLCM was expelled from submarine tubes to the ocean surface in steel canisters or launched directly from armoured box launchers aboard surface ships. Both the SLCM and GLCM were propelled from their launchers or canisters by a solid-rocket booster, which dropped off after the wings and tail fins flipped out and the jet engine ignited. The ALCM, being dropped from a bomb-bay dispenser or wing pylon of a flying B-52 or B-1 bomber, did not require rocket boosting.
As finally deployed, the U.S. cruise missiles were intermediate-range weapons that flew at an altitude of 100 feet to a range of 1,500 miles. The SLCM was produced in three versions: a tactical-range (275-mile) antiship missile, with a combination of inertial guidance and active radar homing and with a high-explosive warhead; and two intermediate-range land-attack versions, with combined inertial and Tercom guidance and with either a high-explosive or a 200-kiloton nuclear warhead. The ALCM carried the same nuclear warhead as the SLCM, while the GLCM carried a low-yield warhead of 10 to 50 kilotons.
The ALCM entered service in 1982 and the SLCM in 1984. The GLCM was first deployed to Europe in 1983, but all GLCMs were dismantled after the signing of the INF Treaty.
Although their small size and low flight paths made the ALCM and SLCM difficult to detect by radar (the ALCM presented a radar cross section only one one-thousandth that of the B-52 bomber), their subsonic speed of about 500 miles per hour made them vulnerable to air defenses once they were detected. For this reason, the U.S. Air Force began production of an advanced cruise missile, which would incorporate stealth technologies such as radar-absorbent materials and smooth, nonreflective surface shapes. The advanced cruise missile would have a range of over 1,800 miles.

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