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July 5, 2000

Cole


The British company Alenia Marconi is building the Brimstone missile (a variant of the US Hellfire) to provide the Royal Air Force with an air-launched anti-tank missile to replace the current weapon (the unguided BL755 cluster bomb). The company, however, is now promoting the weapon as a replacement for the Swingfire anti-tank missile used by the British Army's Striker anti-tank vehicle. Swingfire cannot penetrate the current generation of tanks. Brimstone currently carries a US-designed two-stage shaped-charge warhead designed to penetrate reactive armor and any known tank. The company is considering a high explosive fragmentation warhead that could be used for other targets, and wants to produce this as a delayed-explosion design