The U.S. military as a whole is pushing ahead as fast as I can to field hypersonic weapons, with it recently emerging that the U.S. Air Force, Army, and Navy were cooperating on the development of a single boost-glide vehicle design. But while there’s been much discussion about hypersonic vehicle shapes, as well as the means of accelerating them to five times the speed of sound or more, there’s been less public attention given to what sorts of warheads they might actually carry. Earlier in 2018, Northrop Grumman demonstrated a 50-pound design that it says could work particularly well with this new class of weapons.
In March 2018, the Virginia-headquartered defense contractor showed off the warhead at a testing facility belonging to Energetic Materials and & Products, Inc. (EMPI) in Burnet, Texas to unnamed prospective customers working on unspecified hypersonic weapons, which Jane’s 360 was first to report. A second test of the warhead, which uses Northrop Grumman’s Lethality Enhanced Ordnance (LEO) technology, occurred testing firm NTS' site in Camden, Alaska in August 2018.
“LEO is a fairly generic technology: PBXN-110 explosive fill and fragmentation layer,” Pat Nolan, the Vice President and General Manager of Northrop Grumman’s Missile Products division, told Jane’s earlier in October 2018. “It's how we array those fragments that determines the desired effects.”