Offensive missiles are much cheaper than missile defenses. So is the best defense a good offense?

  PENTAGON The Navy is refitting its decades-old China Lake weapons testing and research site in the Mojave Desert to begin hosting hypersonic weapons testing from a variety of platforms, including undersea launchers. A notice posted on a government contracting Website Tuesday night offered the first concrete evidence that the Pentagon is moving ahead on… Keep reading →

“AFWIC was told to inform and try to shape the ’20 POM,” Fantini told reporters, but that 2020-2024 budget plan is due out in February and was already largely locked down. “But the ’21 POM,” he said, it’s “game on.”

“Long-range precision fires… would provide us the capability (to) either, for example, support the Air Force by suppressing enemy air defenses at hundreds upon hundreds of miles or support the Navy by engaging enemy surface ships at great distances as well,” said Army Secretary Mark Esper. But those examples are two distinctly different missions, each most relevant to a different theater of war.

The White House surprised DoD with a last-minute $33 billion budget trim last week. But it’s far from certain that the cuts will outlive months of haggling between the Trump administration, the Pentagon and Congress.

We explore the possibilities, from cutting-edge hypersonics and 1,000-mile cannon to repackaged Tomahawk cruise missiles and updated Pershing ballstic missiles.

While the Strategic Long-Range Cannon will hit targets at ranges comparable to bleeding-edge hypersonics missiles, Army officials emphasized the cannon is built on proven principles, just bigger.

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.

One Army weapon would be a hypersonic missile, tearing through missile defenses at Mach 5-plus to kill critical hardened targets such as command bunkers. The other would use a gun barrel to launch cheaper, slower missiles at larger numbers of softer targets like radars and missile launchers.

While officials as senior as Chief of Staff Mark Milley have previously talked about Army hypersonics in general terms, today’s statements by both the Army’s Russell and OSD’s Miller were unequivocal: The Army wants a ground-launched hypersonic weapon.