On November 6, the U.S. Army selected the Navy’s Standard Missile-6 (SM-6) and the BGM-109 Tomahawk for its Mid-Range Capability (MRC), part of the service’s ground-launched strike modernization effort. Following the selection, the Army awarded a $339.3 million contract to integrate both weapons for a ground-based launcher by late 2022. The supersonic SM-6 missile has...
On November 9, the U.S. Army conducted its first flight test of the Lower-cost Air Defense (LowerAD) surface-to-air missile. According to the Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command, the flight test, scheduled against a ballistic test vehicle, was successful. Under development since the mid-2010s, LowerAD is a smaller, shorter missile designed to counter unmanned aerial systems...
Acting Defense Secretary Patrick M. Shanahan has warned that the U.S. has come to take military superiority for granted, as a kind of birthright. Perhaps no aspect of military superiority has been taken for granted in the post-Cold War period more than air superiority. With the return of great-power competition and the renewed need to...
On May 12, The Washington Post reported that it had obtained a Defense Department document outlining the Pentagon’s plan to shift $1.5 billion originally designed for military projects such as the Minuteman III ballistic missile program and the Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) to fund the border wall. Two days earlier, Acting Secretary Patrick...
In April, the U.S. Army confirmed it was fielding prototype Army Long-Range Persistent Surveillance (ALPS) systems to U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, U.S. European Command, and U.S. Central Command. The deployments come to address a Joint Urgent Operational Needs Statements (JUONS) from these COCOMs. The Army’s FY2020 budget proposal, released on March 18, laid out plans to...
On March 18, the U.S. Army released its FY2020 budget proposal which laid out plans for the development of three new missile programs. These include the land-based “Long Range Hypersonic Weapon” (LRHW), a “Mobile Medium Range Missile” (MMRM), and a “Future Interceptor” designed to counter lower tier air and missile threats. Over the next five...
The U.S. Army carried out a Soldier Checkout Event, dubbed SCOE 4.0, in which Army personnel employed the in-development Integrated Air and Missile Defense (IAMD) Battle Command System (IBCS). The test reportedly demonstrated communication and data connectivity from 20 nodes at locations in Alabama, New Mexico, and Texas. IBCS is being developed to network the...
Despite the rising salience of missile threats, current air and missile defense forces are far too susceptible to suppression. Today’s U.S. air and missile defense (AMD) force lacks the depth, capacity, and operational flexibility to simultaneously perform both missions
The U.S. Army has been at war continuously for 16 years. New technologies pose new threats and old technologies grow in numbers and capability. If ever the Army were ever to think creatively about how to meet the extraordinary demands it faces, now would be the time.
A new challenge faces the joint force: the prospect of conflict with a near-peer adversary who has spent two decades going to school on the U.S. way of war. Potential adversaries have integrated air defenses and precision-strike weapons that can hold forward-based U.S. forces at risk, complicate maneuver and impair freedom of action.
