The Pentagon has almost completed a study of how to shoot down hypersonic missiles. It’s also developing new offensive weapons — conventional, not nuclear — whose deployment will become legal with the end of the INF Treaty.

PENTAGON: Military and civilian leaders at the Pentagon are portraying the new Missile Defense Review as a common-sense response to aggressive Chinese and Russian investments in new hypersonic weapons and faster, longer-range missiles. The review marks “a new era in missile defense” undersecretary for policy John Rood said at the Pentagon Thursday. But mostly what… Keep reading →

By 2021, plans call for Japan to have eight Aegis destroyers, four of them capable of launching the SM-3 Block IIA missiles, whose second successful test in a row comes as a vindication after two previous failures.

The Japanese government is spending billions on sea and ground-based missile defenses, but all the talk in the Pentagon is on space, as the U.S. scrambles to meet new hypersonic threats from China and Russia.

Some 35 years after Ronald Reagan’s famous Star Wars speech, the Pentagon’s R&D chief said that space-based missile defenses are technically feasible and reasonably affordable.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is promoting what he says are unbeatable hypersonic weapons, and Capitol Hill is listening closely. The result is hundreds of millions in new funding lines.

Pentagon planners aren’t only worried about North Korean ICBMs, but Chinese hypersonics and medium-range missiles. That means, according to analysts, that an array of distributed systems are needed to meet a wide range of potential threats.

“I’d say six to seven years to essentially work out the Concept of Operations (and) develop the capabilities,” Lt. Gen. Samuel Greaves told the Senate.

With the Pentagon and White House increasingly worried about ballistic missile threats from “rogue” states and peer competitors, the Polish site is increasingly critical.

Faced with an improving Russian threat, the United States should deploy a serious space sensor layer to provide persistent birth-to-death tracking of missiles, including against the kind that rip through the air at low altitudes 20 times the speed of sound (hypersonics).