Overview  |  Description  |  Technical card  |  Industrial card  |  Countries equipped

Since the fall of the Berlin wall, western armies have been confronted to situations where having weapons capable of striking objectives deep in hostile territory from a safe distance became a necessity. The military actions in Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan, and Bosnia and in Yugoslavia have illustrated this extensively.

The Apache family of missiles was born from this observation. The first version, with solely an anti-runway function, has given rise to derivatives, the main representative of which is the Scalp-EG (a French acronym for General purpose long-range cruise system).

Parallel to its adoption by France, between 1993 and 1996, the CASOM competition took place in United Kingdom with a view to procuring conventional warhead stand-off missiles. As a proposal to this competition, Matra Défense associated with British Aerospace for the event and submitted a missile virtually identical to the Scalp-EG, the Storm Shadow. In July 1996, this was declared the winner of the contest. Because of the similarity between the programmes, France and the United Kingdom decided to collaborate on a joint basis for the procurement of the missile. This led to the creation of a rational industrial structure and later to the sealing of the alliance between Matra and Bae in the missile area. In 1999, Italia has joined the French-British community adopting the Storm Shadow.

This missile is delivered since 2003 to the Royal Air Force and the French Air Force (Armée de l’Air). 500 units must be supplied to French air forces of which 50 for the French navy (Marine Nationale).

The operational start-up is effective since 2005 in the French Air Force for Mirage 2000-D and Rafale.

Operation service from the aircraft-carrier "Charles de Gaulle" is planned for 2008.

The "Scalp-EG" programme is managed by Nuclear and Missile programme department of the Weapon Systems Service of DGA (DGA/DSA/SPNuM).

Storm-Shadow was used for the first time in operation by Great Britain in Iraq in 2003.