Carter Unveils US Army’s New Ship-Killer Missile: ATACMS Upgrade

[F-22Raptor]

WASHINGTON: The Army’s long-range artillery rocket, ATACMS, will get upgraded to strike moving targets on land and at sea, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter announced today. After at least two years of pressure from Congress and vague promises from Pentagon leaders, and for the first time since the Coastal Artillery Corps was disbanded 66 years ago, the Army is officially back in the business of killing ships. That gives the largest service a big new role in countering Russian aggression in the Baltic and Black Seas or defending allies like the Philippines against China.

The project to upgrade the Lockheed-built ATACMS is sponsored by the Strategic Capabilities Office, created by Carter back in 2012 and headed by his protégé, Will Roper. (Our exclusive interview with Roper is here and here). SCO’s involvement, incidentally, explains why no one in the Army or industry said this was happening: SCO keeps secrecy locked tight — its very existence was classified at first — unless and until they decides the deterrent value of letting adversaries know about a weapon in peacetime outweighs the tactical value of surprising them with it in wartime.

“A prominent theme of SCO’s work is spearheading creative and unexpected new ways to use our existing missiles and advanced munitions, and across varied domains,” Carter said this morning at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “One example of this that I want to highlight – something I haven’t talked about publically before today – is SCO’s project to develop a cross-domain capability for the Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS. By integrating an existing seeker onto the front of the missile, they’re enabling it to hit moving targets, both at sea as well as on land. With this capability, what was previously an Army surface-to-surface missile system can project power from coastal locations up to 300 kilometers into the maritime domain.”

SCO’s hand is evident in the low-hanging fruit approach Carter described. Rather than develop the Army a purpose-built shore-based anti-ship missile, or even buying one of the many available on the global market, the project is taking an existing, proven weapon, ATACMS, and fitting it with an existing seeker. (Carter didn’t say what program the seeker came from). Currently, ATACMS can only navigate to a specified set of coordinates, so it can only hit static targets with precision. (It can hit moving targets, like tanks, by blanketing their general area with cluster munitions, but the US is phasing those out). With a seeker added, however, ATACMS can pick out a moving target and home in on it. And once you’ve made a missile capable of hitting moving targets of whatever kind, industry officials have told me, it’s relatively easy to make it capable of hitting targets on both land and sea.

That’s something I learned, incidentally, while researching ATACMS’ longer-ranged successor, the Long-Range Precision Fires program. The current requirement for LRPF doesn’t include the capability to strike moving targets, either on land or at sea, but the new missile must be at least as capable as the ATACMS. That strongly implies that if the current ATACMS gets an anti-ship capability, the future LRPF will get it too.

But why does the Army need to sink ships, anyway? Don’t we have a Navy for that? The answer lies in evolving concepts like Multi-Domain Battle and the Third Offset Strategy, the topic of today’s CSIS conference. In essence, 25 years after the stunning debut of stealth, smart weapons, and GPS in the First Gulf War, potential adversaries have not only copied most of those technologies but woven them together into complex, layered defenses designed to keep US forces at bay — so-called Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD) systems. In particular, both China and Russia have invested heavily in long-range missiles, and the requisite sensors and command networks, that are based on land but can shoot down US aircraft high in the air or sink US ships well out at sea. (The most notorious example is the Chinese DF-21 anti-ship ballistic missile, nicknamed the “carrier killer.”)

In such a lethal war zone, land-based missile batteries have one huge advantage: They can’t sink. That’s something our enemies have exploited for years. Now the US military will seize that advantage for itself.

http://breakingdefense.com/2016/10/army-atacms-missile-will-kill-ships-secdef-carter/

 

[F-22Raptor]

The US military is getting serious on destroying adversaries ships. Anti-ship upgrades to SM-6, Tomahawk, Atacms, and the new LRASM missile will place foreign ships at extreme risk.