Israel’s Rafael Wins $200M Asian Deal for SPICE-2000 Bombs, Spike ATGMs

Israeli firm Rafael has said it won a $200 million contract to provide an Asian country with SPICE 2000 air-to-surface systems, Spike ATGMs, tactical, electro-optically guided missiles, and advanced communication systems.

Citing official UK sources, Jane’s Defence Weekly wrote that the Asian country to which Rafael is selling these weapons to, is India, which already has some of them.

New Delhi claims it deployed fighters equipped with SPICE-2000 bunker buster bombs during Balakot air strikes in February 2019. It bought 100 of these bombs in June 2019 along with Mark 84 warheads for $43.2 million (INR 300 crore).

Smart, Precise, Impact, Cost-Effective (SPICE) is a family of stand-off, autonomous, air-to-ground weapon systems that strike targets with pinpoint accuracy and at high attack volumes, independently of GPS navigation, based on autonomous electro-optic Scene-Matching Artificial Intelligence (AI) Algorithms. The SPICE family consists of SPICE-250, SPICE-1000, and SPICE-2000 variants, with ranges of up to 100 km. They are a derivative of Popeye air-to-surface missile and are fed with coordinates and satellite pictures of the target to home in and destroy it. The EO/GPS-guided guidance kit can transform unguided bombs into precision-guided bombs.

The Spike family consists of five variants (SR, MR, LR2, ER2, NLOS) of electro-optical, multi-purpose, multi-platform missiles, with ranges of up to 32 km and fire-and-update capabilities. Spike missiles have been integrated onto 45 different vehicular, helicopter and naval platforms.

The new contract includes Rafael’s Bnet system, a family of advanced Broadband IP MANET (Mobile Ad-hoc NETwork) Software Defined Radios for tactical operations, supporting the modern digital battlefield’s needs with high-speed, low delay, reliable connectivity for data, voice and video on-the-move.