Talk:Tomahawk missile

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: not moved. There does not appear to be consensus that the current disambiguator is not natural. (non-admin closure) Alpha3031 (t • c) 15:42, 22 September 2025 (UTC)

Tomahawk missile → Tomahawk (missile)Tomahawk (missile) – I attempted to WP:BOLDly correct this page title after the recent RM moved to a title that does not comply with MOS. This a proposal to comply with WP:PARENDIS. Per discussion on my talk page after that previous move attempt, "Tomahawk missile" also isn't the WP:COMMONNAME; uses of that in sources are of the "Tomahawk, a missile" type (and, IMHO, it's a...I'm not sure there's a page for it, but it strikes me as being too "casual English" for a page title). It's a disambiguator, and while WP:NATURALDISAMBIG is a thing, it's not a truly natural one here. Note also a similar "one missile with different boosters leading to different designations" (i.e. why it's not at, say, BGM-109 Tomahawk - as there's also AGM-109, RGM-109, and UGM-109) is at Harpoon (missile) which is compliant with MOS, as this proposed move would make this page. The Bushranger _{One ping only} 07:49, 30 August 2025 (UTC)— Relisting. Tenshi! (Talk page) 14:30, 6 September 2025 (UTC) — Relisting. Toadspike [Talk] 12:02, 16 September 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose The article isn't implying that the missile is called "Tomahawk Missile", but almost no one just uses Tomahawk without the "missile" in common parlance. I believe this is a good implementation of WP:NATURAL. ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 20:53, 30 August 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose, move to Tomahawk (missile family) instead -- per what is standard usage on our articles with other large families of missiles such as Aster (missile family), Arrow (missile family), CAMM (missile family), Kalibr (missile family), Hisar (missile family), MANSUP (missile family), Hwasong (missile family), and practically all civilian SLVs -- see, e.g., Titan (rocket family), Long March (rocket family), R-7 (rocket family), Thor (rocket family), Delta (rocket family), etc.⇒SWATJester ^{Shoot Blues, Tell VileRat!} 02:18, 31 August 2025 (UTC)
  • @Swatjester: The difference is those are, well, missile families - mutliple missiles that are similar enough to have a common name/article, as opposed to a single missile - which Tomahawk is - which differes in its launch enviroment. See also Harpoon (missile), not Harpoon (missile family) as there also it's a single missile that sometimes has a booster attached and thus different designations. I strongly oppose "Tomahawk (missile family)" as Tomahawk is not a missile family. - The Bushranger _{One ping only} 03:36, 31 August 2025 (UTC)

  @The Bushranger: I think that's at best a nuance and disagree with your assessment. The whole point of a missile family is that it shares common similarities (generally around a common chassis and propulsion type), and has members with different capabilities -- warheads, sensors, launch platforms, and targets. That's as equally applicable to the Tomahawk as it is for any other type of missile family on that list. e.g. the TLAM-N being nuclear-only, surface-ship launched against strategic targets with a ~2500 with no active radar capabilities, no loitering capability, and a range roughly 60%-ish that of the Block IV TacTom BGM-109E and more than twice that of TASM (which was a conventional anti-ship variant without TERCOM but with active radar and a conventional warhead roughly half that of the Block IV's). So no, it's not really just launch environment by which they differ. But also, I think if you look at it against the other "family" style articles, and let's specifically compare with Kalibr, which is widely considered to be a "Tomahawk-ski" clone: you'll find almost the exact same distinctions. Surface launched version, subsurface version, air launched version -- Kalibr have an export variant which the Tomahawk doesn't, but no separate nuclear or ground launched variants which the Tomahawk does (both the separate article for the 1980's BGM-109G, but also the Block IV TacTom which since 2023 is fired from the Army's Typhon missile system). Which means the Tomahawk is actually *more* diverse of a family than the Kalibr is in terms of capability. Tomahawk is also more diverse of a family than Arrow (given that Arrow 1 was a test platform and Arrow 4 doesn't exist yet -- both Arrow 2 and 3 are ground-launched anti-ballistic missiles with different range bands). Or compare to the Hisar family -- Hisar RF doesn't exist yet, and Hisar A vs. Hisar O is a difference of short vs. medium range with the missiles utilizing the same seeker, datalink, proximity fuse and rocket motor. Aster has a larger number of variants with a wider variety of ranges, but they're still all SAMs (some with ABM capability) and have less launch-platform variety than the Tomahawk. My point here is not to deep dive into the relative capabilities but that I think you're significantly understating how varied the Tomahawk family is in comparison to other missile families. And for what it's worth, I also think that Harpoon should be Harpoon (missile family), especially as the SLAM and SLAM-ER variants were already spun off into their own articles. ⇒SWATJester ^{Shoot Blues, Tell VileRat!} 04:13, 31 August 2025 (UTC)

• Support – WP:NATURAL is intended for common, everyday names; 'Tomahawk missile' is hardly an example of that. I challenge anyone to find many examples of crafts or vehicles that require disambiguation here on WP, and are disambiguated as in 'Tomahawk missile': they would rather be disambiguated as in 'Tomahawk (missile)'.

And what's the deal with all these 'family' as in Arrow (missile family)? It would be pretty obvious to the reader that an article titled Arrow (missile) would cover the whole family of Arrow missiles. This is disambiguation pedantry gone out of control. -- Deeday-UK (talk) 10:21, 31 August 2025 (UTC)

Why would one assume it's obvious? Or that such an assumption would be correct, given that several of the "missile family" article have spin-off articles for specific variants? If I read an article entitled Arrow (missile) my first response if I knew anything about the system would be "which one?" If I was pointed to Harpoon (missile), what about that name would cause me to expect the AGM-84H/K SLAM-ER to be covered there -- a missile that is part of the Harpoon family, but is not technically designated a Harpoon? Please don't assume bad faith about the motives for dealing with disambiguation, that's incredibly unhelpful. ⇒SWATJester ^{Shoot Blues, Tell VileRat!} 16:44, 31 August 2025 (UTC)

Yeah ok, I was a bit drastic, and the Arrow is not the best example of what I meant. Tomahawk (missile family) is though: I see no other articles about Tomahawk missile variants, so everything about Tomahawk missiles will be in this one article, and to distinguish it from a tomahawk axe or the Tomahawk (band), a '(missile)' in the title is all that it takes. -- Deeday-UK (talk) 18:15, 31 August 2025 (UTC)

As I mentioned above to The Bushranger, BGM-109G Gryphon is the article for the 1980's version of the ground-launched Tomahawk; there's also an article for the Typhon missile system which is the 2023-era launch platform for the ground-launched Tomahawk, not the missile itself, but contains some information about the Block IV Tomahawk that isn't contained in the main article. The point is not that (missile) is insufficient to distinguish the ordnance from the axe or the band; the point is that (missile) is an inaccurate descriptor for something that is really several different types of missiles with different launch platforms, targets, sensors, avionics, ranges, and capabilities. '(missile family)' is a more WP:PRECISE term. ⇒SWATJester ^{Shoot Blues, Tell VileRat!} 19:28, 31 August 2025 (UTC)

Tomahawk missiles often appear in the news, and events involving them are widely discussed. They are not an obscure piece of military hardware, but a famous and widely-known one that people widely associate with America like the Nighthawk stealth bomber, Abrams tank or F-35. I don't think the argument that this is too obscure to qualify for natural disambiguation holds water. ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 05:36, 2 September 2025 (UTC)

And what's the deal with all these 'family' as in Arrow (missile family)? It would be pretty obvious to the reader that an article titled Arrow (missile) would cover the whole family of Arrow missiles.

The actual definition of missile is "an object that can be propelled to strike a target". Nowadays it's primarily used to mean rocket-propelled bombs but by definition an arrow is a missile. Ladtrack (talk) 15:16, 4 September 2025 (UTC)

Yes, if we want to be pedantic, an arrow is a missile (which kind of proves the point in my first comment). Feel free to propose moving Missile to Missile (rrocket-propelled bomb). -- Deeday-UK (talk) 08:09, 5 September 2025 (UTC)

• Support Tomahawk (missile) feels more natural to me. And as an aside, I find it interesting (for example) that M-16 is simply listed as M-16 rifle instead of M-16 rifle family even though there are a number of variants (the article lists something like 9). Intothatdarkness 15:05, 2 September 2025 (UTC)

  The reason we don't use "(missile family)" for M16 rifle in the article title, aside from the fact that it's not a missile, is because "M16" is a designation for a particular set of variants of the broader family of AR-15 style rifle, which is named as such due to specific media coverage using that terminology (WP:COMMONNAME). In other words, M16 is not the family, it's a subset of the family; outside of the limited context of MOS:AT, the term "family" is regularly used for the M16 and M4 both within the military, in civilian shooting culture, and it's regularly used on our projects as well (four separate times on M4 carbine for instance).⇒SWATJester ^{Shoot Blues, Tell VileRat!} 17:54, 6 September 2025 (UTC)

  I know how family is used in shooting culture and the military as well when it comes to weapons. However, I was pointing out what appears to be an arbitrary disconnect based simply on weapon category. Of course this being Wikipedia I should be used to this kind of thing by now. And with your M4 example, family may be used in the article itself, but it's not used in the article title (which is what's being proposed for Tomahawk). Intothatdarkness 02:51, 7 September 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose per WP:NATURAL. 162 etc. (talk) 16:56, 6 September 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose per WP:NATURAL. I easily found plenty of sources that use Tomahawk missile in titles and/or prose, including PBS, Britannica, and US military pages. FWIW, Ngram shows that Tomahawk missile appears more often in books than the names of several other articles that include the word Tomahawk. --MYCETEAE 🍄‍🟫—talk 19:43, 16 September 2025 (UTC)
  • That is in the sense of "Tomahawk, that is a missile", not as a proper full name. - The Bushranger _{One ping only} 21:47, 16 September 2025 (UTC)

    Right, this shows that Tomahawk missile is sufficiently common that it is both natural and recognizable per WP:CRITERIA and therefore is a good candidate for natural disambiguation. I wholeheartedly disagree with your assertion that it's not a truly natural [disambiguator] here. This Ngram indicates missile-related usage is the most common usage of the word "Tomahawk". Tomahawk cruise missile would also be suitable title, and is somewhat more common per this Ngram, but not so much more common as to be better than the current, more concise title. --MYCETEAE 🍄‍🟫—talk 22:12, 16 September 2025 (UTC)

    That still doesn't make "Tomahawk missile" the name of the article subject; this is why WP:PARENDIS exists. - The Bushranger _{One ping only} 22:26, 16 September 2025 (UTC)

    No, actually. PARENDIS is a last resort:

    Adding a disambiguating term in parentheses after the ambiguous name is Wikipedia's standard disambiguation technique when none of the other solutions lead to an optimal article title.

    Natural disambiguation using one of the two common names is an unambiguously better option. --MYCETEAE 🍄‍🟫—talk 22:42, 16 September 2025 (UTC)

  also per apparent WP:COMMONNAME, as discussed above. --MYCETEAE 🍄‍🟫—talk 22:44, 16 September 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose Normally this is correct, but Tomahawk missile is a very common phrase in assorted media. Metallurgist (talk) 21:25, 16 September 2025 (UTC)
  • See above. - The Bushranger _{One ping only} 21:47, 16 September 2025 (UTC)

    I disagree. Metallurgist (talk) 20:19, 19 September 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose. This is a clear-cut case of WP:NATURAL and as noted above parenthetical disambiguation is to be used only when other methods of disambiguation are not viable. --Srleffler (talk) 23:41, 21 September 2025 (UTC)