![]() ![]() ![]() They provide the required mix of capability to engage desired targets at mid-range distances. “The Tomahawk and SM-6 were chosen in order to accelerate a mature capability to address near-peer threats. Details are not publicly releasable due to OPSEC considerations,” Army officials wrote me in an email. “The Army and joint service partners have conducted extensive mission thread analysis to solidify the kill chain and communications systems required to support MRC operations. The Army’s official press release and its full responses to my questions follow.Īrmy Awards Mid-Range Capability (MRC) Other Transaction (OT) Agreement_Final by BreakingDefense on Scribd But the Army is eager to prove its relevance to future wars against high-tech adversaries, especially in the vast Pacific, and it argues that truck-launched missiles are cheaper to deploy and easier to hide than weapons mounted on ships and planes. That’s not something it’s done since the Pershing was retired, and some critics consider it redundant to the existing Navy and Air Force arsenals. Why should the Army be launching long-range missiles at all? In the longer run, however, the Army may well develop a new weapon for the MRC role, perhaps derived from DARPA’s hypersonic OpFires experiment. A missile defense that stops one may not stop the other, complicating the enemy’s countermeasures.īoth missiles are available in the near term, a crucial consideration given the Army’s urgency to field the Mid-Range Capability by the end of 2023. The Tomahawks come in relatively low and slow, trying to get under radar, while the SM-6s fly high and fast. That allows the Army to buy more Tomahawks than SM-6s and reserve the faster, more expensive missiles for harder or higher-priority targets. The current model of SM-6 is nearly $5 million, and the hypersonic, extended-range SM-6 1B will no doubt cost more. Tomahawk is relatively affordable at about $1.4 million each, or perhaps $2.5 million for the anti-ship variant. Why mix both SM-6 and Tomahawk in the same unit? Part of the answer is probably cost. The USS John Paul Jones test-fires an SM-6 missile from a Vertical Launch System (VLS) While the Navy plans for Block 1B to complete development only in 2024, it wouldn’t be a stretch to have a handful of missiles available early for the Army’s MRC roll-out in late 2023. What’s more, while the current SM-6 maxes out at Mach 3.5, the SM-6 Block 1B will reportedly reach hypersonic speeds, i.e. (It’ll use the rocket booster from another Standard Missile variant, the ICBM-killing SM-3, which is known to have a range greater than 1,000 miles). However, the Navy is now developing an extended-range model of the SM-6, the Block 1B. While the real range is classified, estimates range up to 290 miles (250 nautical miles). ![]() The SM-6 selection surprised me at first, because its reported ranges are well short of the 1,000 miles the Army wants for the Mid-Range Capability. But the new SM-6 is also capable of striking surface targets on land and sea. The supersonic SM-6 is the latest and sexiest version of the Navy’s Standard Missile family, whose primary role is defensive, built to shoot incoming enemy aircraft and missiles out of the sky. The Army and Marine Corps are both intensely interested in turning Pacific islands into forward outposts bristling with ship-killer missiles, so they’re likely to buy the Maritime Strike model. Lockheed builds the current wheeled HIMARS and tracked MLRS launchers, which can handle a wide variety of current and future Army weapons, but neither the service nor the company would say whether they could fire either SM-6 or Tomahawk, citing security concerns.īut in recent years, anxiety over the growing Chinese fleet led the Pentagon to build a new anti-ship model, the Maritime Strike Tomahawk (MSM). Lockheed Martin won the OTA contract, worth up to $339.4 million with all options, to integrate the two missiles – both built by Raytheon – into the Army fire control systems, vehicles, and support equipment required for a fully functioning artillery battery. ![]() “The Army will leverage Navy contract vehicles for missile procurement in support of the Army integration OT agreement.” “Following a broad review of joint service technologies potentially applicable to MRC, the Army has selected variants of the Navy SM-6 and Tomahawk missiles to be part of the initial prototype,” says a Rapid Capabilities & Critical Technologies Office (RCCTO) statement released this afternoon. WASHINGTON: Instead of picking a single missile to be its thousand-mile Mid-Range Capability, the Army has chosen to mix two very different Navy weapons together in its prototype MRC unit: the new, supersonic, high-altitude SM-6 and the venerable, subsonic, low-flying Tomahawk. ![]()
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