France's stealthy runway-cracking cruise missile, and the airframe SCALP EG grew from
Storm Shadow's predecessor: the French Matra Apache anti-runway dispenser missile (He Ping De Ying)
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Army officials plan to resume Apache training flights in days, after the fleet was grounded following a crash that left two soldiers dead in Texas.
The Apache’s first flight took place in 1975.
The Apache crashed roughly 30 miles away from the base, in Salado, Texas.
Entity 'Apache' mentioned in report
Entity 'Apache' mentioned in report
Entity 'Apache' mentioned in report
The Army fully embraced the upgraded Arrowhead version by 2011, when the service celebrated delivery of its 1,000th unit and had equipped roughly 704 Apaches across the fleet with the improved system.
An attack helicopter went down off the coast of Oman this month after a Shahed drone engaged with the aircraft.
APACHE was a French runway-attack missile and precursor to SCALP/Storm Shadow.
APACHE was developed in France as an air-launched cruise missile focused on runway denial and submunition delivery. It became a technical precursor to the later SCALP EG/Storm Shadow family, sharing aerodynamic and stealth-influenced design themes. The system reflects France's effort to create independent deep-strike weapons for attacks against high-value infrastructure.
APACHE specialized in low-altitude runway attack with ejectable payloads.
APACHE used a powered cruise-missile airframe intended to approach defended targets at low altitude and release runway-attack submunitions. Unlike unitary-warhead deep-strike weapons, its purpose was to disable airbase surfaces and related infrastructure. This specialization made it useful for airfield attack doctrine but less flexible than later unitary SCALP/Storm Shadow missiles.
APACHE's service role was niche, but its design lineage fed later European deep-strike missiles.
France ordered APACHE AP missiles, but the design's larger legacy is its connection to the SCALP/Storm Shadow deep-strike family. As precision-strike requirements evolved, unitary and penetrator warheads became more broadly useful than runway submunitions alone. APACHE remains important because it shows the step-by-step path from runway denial to modern stealthy cruise missiles.
Figures combine French parliamentary budget documents with open-source reference data; dimensions are open-source estimates unless stated.
Milestones drawn from French parliamentary records and published program accounts.
Matra and Messerschmitt-Bolkow-Blohm begin work on an unpowered ejectable-charge dispenser. Its short reach leaves the launch aircraft inside enemy surface-to-air envelopes, and a turbojet is added to the concept. Germany leaves the project in 1988.
The French defence ministry notifies the APACHE development contract, with program direction under the missile and nuclear programs service of the armament directorate.
The Bundestag confirms an Apache buy for Luftwaffe Tornados; the decision is later reversed, leaving France as the sole customer.
The development phase culminates in firing trials at the Landes test centre and in Sweden, where the first qualification shot is completed.
The DGA orders APACHE AP from Matra BAe Dynamics for roughly 1.5 billion francs. An original ambition of about 500 rounds had already been reduced to the 100 funded by the 1997-2002 military programming law.
APACHE AP is declared operational as the principal air-to-ground tactical weapon of the Mirage 2000D, later cleared on the Rafale.
Forty-five rounds were handed over in 2002 and fifty-one in 2003; the last four arrive in 2004 at a unit cost of 1.66 million euros. Program cost was assessed at 674.4 million euros in November 2002.
After the stock was cocooned in 2008-2009, the DGA commits 12 million euros through the NATO Support and Procurement Agency to dismantle the missiles between 2014 and 2018.
APACHE AP was built for one doctrinal problem: closing an enemy air base without flying over it. The anti-runway weapons that preceded it in French and allied service, from Durandal and BAP 100 to the British JP233, all required an overflight at very low altitude, a flight profile that the 1991 Gulf War showed to be extremely costly against a defended airfield. Fitting a turbojet, low-observable shaping and a terrain-hugging flight profile to a dispenser body moved the release point roughly 140 km back, with a millimetre-wave radar cueing the ejection of ten KRISS penetrators along the runway axis and delayed fuzing intended to keep repair crews away for hours afterwards.
The weapon nevertheless remained a narrow instrument, and French procurement treated it as such. An early ambition of several hundred rounds was cut to the hundred funded under the 1997-2002 programming law, and at 1.66 million euros apiece a runway strike consuming roughly five missiles was an expensive proposition for a mission that mattered only in the opening phase of a high-intensity campaign. Ten unguided submunitions per round also placed APACHE within the scope of the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions, which France signed that December; French sources date the withdrawal and cocooning to 2008-2009 without attributing it to a single cause, and disposal ran from 2014 to 2018. The missile was never fired in anger.
Its more durable contribution was structural. The aerodynamics, stealth treatment and low-level penetration logic proved on APACHE were carried into the SCALP EG from 1994, trading the submunition bay for a single penetrating warhead and a longer reach, and that design in turn became the Storm Shadow, Black Shaheen and the naval SCALP now fielded from French surface ships and submarines. Judged as a fielded capability APACHE was a short and limited episode; judged as the reference airframe for Europe's principal conventional deep-strike family, it was among the more consequential French missile programs of the 1990s.
AGM-65 Maverick and the French Apache dispenser missile (He Ping De Ying)
Watch on BilibiliApache: the French cruise missile built to neutralise enemy runways (Missiles Francais)
Watch on YouTubeStorm Shadow/SCALP, the general-purpose missile derived from Apache (MBDA)
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