Even as the Kremlin grapples with the reality of losing up to 250,000 young men killed and wounded in the past year and Beijing weighs the pros and cons of a full-scale invasion of Taiwan, threats to the U.S. homeland persist.
As last week's Chinese spy balloon saga reaffirmed.
At the same time, technological leaps in the field of hypersonic weapons by Russia and China have prompted the Pentagon to invest aggressively in R&D.
To bolster U.S. defenses, senior officials with the U.S. Navy revealed their intention to prototype a new detection system to identify and track hypersonic weapons.
But they want help from the private sector, more specifically the small business community, as DefenseScoop explains:
The aim of the Tip-Off Optical Reconnaissance-Sensor for Counter-Hypersonics (TORCH) program is to “develop and demonstrate critical elements of advanced optical system design for the detection, identification, and tracking of hypersonic cruise missiles to provide early cueing of fixed-site and ship self-defense systems in a tiered fixed and mobile network utilizing both unmanned and manned platform concepts,” according to a pre-release for a Small Business Innovation Research broad agency announcement that is scheduled to be published Wednesday.
The initiative comes amid Pentagon concerns about Chinese and Russian hypersonic capabilities, and the United States' pursuit of its own offensive hypersonic weapons. These types of missiles are highly sought by the United States and other major powers because they can fly faster than Mach 5, be highly maneuverable against enemy air defenses and quickly attack time-sensitive targets.
“Hypersonic weapons represent a new and disruptive threat to Armed Forces worldwide. The operational attributes of this class of vehicle present a unique detection and defense problem. There is a need for advanced sensing to support initial detection (“tipoff”), as well as targeting and guidance for defensive systems. A unique attribute of hypersonic weapons is the ability to maneuver and approach a target area from many potential directions, which vastly complicates the sensing problem by increasing the required search volume and requiring increased sensing resources,” the pre-release noted.
The Defense Department is pursuing a distributed, early-warning sensing architecture to alert U.S. forces to incoming threats.
In December, the U.S. Air Force reported its first successful air-launched hypersonic missile.
Flying off the Pacific coast, a B-52 fired an AGM-183A missile. An Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW), the AGM-183A uses rockets to accelerate its payload to high hypersonic speeds. After reaching the desired speed, the payload detaches from the rocket and glides to its target.
In 2021, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley compared China's suspected hypersonic missile test to the Sputnik crisis.
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The last thing I heard from general Milley was that the military needed to be more proactive about sex change operations to make the men into women and the women into men…??? He said that was the way to make the military stronger…???
We need to invest more time and money to enhance and build more pf our nuclear submarines (BOOMERS) as they are virtually undetectable whereas the rest of our forces are pretty much sitting ducks for something like this.
I fear duplicitous Chairman Xi. I also fear Tsar Putin much more if he loses his war, than if he wins it. Much more I fear the likes of Gen, silly, shilly Milley and I sure am glad I ain’t in his Army.