Pentagon Readies New Ship-Killers for Showdown with China
November 12th, 2010Via: Wired:
Pentagon planners were wary of China’s double-digit military-budget growth rates even before the global economic crisis put the squeeze on America’s own defense investment. Now the Chinese army’s growth continues while America’s flat-lines. That’s got the U.S. military, especially the Navy, scrambling for new ideas.
The most hopeful is an emerging concept for mixing U.S. Navy ships and subs with Air Force planes to form a tightly-knit, super-lethal, ship-killing force meant to counter an increasingly powerful Chinese fleet. The Pentagon calls it “AirSea Battle,” an homage to NATO’s Cold War “AirLand Battle” concept that pioneered tactics for taking out thousands of Soviet tanks with smart weapons. U.S. Secretary of Defense Bob Gates called the classified AirSea Battle concept “encouraging.”
It seems AirSea Battle mostly involves better communications and command procedures for integrating ships and planes into the same task forces. But there’s at least one new piece of hardware: a new, more deadly anti-ship missile. On Wednesday, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency awarded Lockheed Martin a 3-year, $160 million contract to develop the Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile. The goal is for LRASM to give Navy ships “the ability to attack important enemy ships outside the ranges of the enemy’s ability to respond with anti-ship missiles of their own.”
