The US could develop more than a dozen different land-based weapons for $7 to $12 billion, thinktank CSBA estimates.

WASHINGTON: As the Navy continues to look for ways to reach out and touch — or preferably deter — potential adversaries at greater range, it is turning to the latest version of a decades-old weapon to do it.

“We’ve spent a lot of time over the past years playing defense,” Rear Adm. Ronald Boxall, director of surface warfare, said at the West 2019 conference here. “The best defense is a good offense, and the idea that we will go after the threat — at range — is something that we have to be able to do.”

It’s a major shift after decades in which submarines focused on projecting power ashore, with their only anti-ship weapons being their rarely-used torpedoes. Driving the change: increasing anxiety about China.

“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.

INF proponents emphasize the risk of nuclear weapons. But, despite its name, the treaty bans a wide range of conventional weapons as well — and it’s non-nuclear, precision-guided missiles that have changed how war is actually waged.

US Ambassador to NATO Kay Bailey Hutchison sent a warning to Moscow about violating the INF treaty — one that NATO allies appear prepared to back up.

WASHINGTON: In one of the largest coordinated international air operations in years, over 100 American, British and French guided missiles slammed into three Syrian chemical weapons facilities early Saturday morning, launched from an armada of aircraft, submarines, and ships offshore. The Pentagon was careful Saturday to say that the assault didn’t seek to topple the… Keep reading →

HERITAGE FOUNDATION: Just calm down and read the document. That, in essence, is the administration’s response to critics who call its new nuclear strategy irresponsible and dangerous. In fact, deputy undersecretary for policy David Trachtenberg said over and over here this morning, the Nuclear Posture Review is fundamentally conservative (with a small “c”). The 2018… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: Just three years ago, the Navy faced the Russian and Chinese fleets with just one aging, short-range anti-ship missile, the Harpoon. Today, it’s successfully test-fired at least four very different missile types and may actually need to narrow down. There’s the converted SM-6 anti-aircraft missile as the lightest, fastest option and the Kongsberg Naval… Keep reading →