SPEED KILLS, MILITARY WANTS MORE

550 miles per hour is too slow. And a 1,500-mile range just isn’t big enough.
The Tomahawk cruise mis­sile may seem fast and far-​​reaching. But Pentagon plan­ners want more. Late last week, they handed out con­tracts to 10 firms to start design­ing a hyper­sonic mis­sile that can out­run the now-​​retired Concorde, and can hit a ter­ror­ist nest in Europe from the East Coast.
The Falcon, or Force Application and Launch from the Continental United States, project aims to fire a bunker-​​busting bomb into near-​​space, and then send it crash­ing into a tar­get more than 3,000 miles away, at four times the speed of sound.
Speed is becom­ing an increas­ingly cru­cial com­po­nent of how American forces fight. In the Gulf War, it took days for the U.S. mil­i­tary to iden­tify a tar­get and put a bomb on it. In recent engage­ments in Afghanistan and Iraq, that process was cut to as lit­tle as 20 min­utes, in some cases.
But this quick response only hap­pens when there are bombers and cruise mis­siles in the imme­di­ate neigh­bor­hood. If U.S. forces receive a tip that ter­ror­ists are in a part of the world where they don’t have American planes in the sky, it can take hours, or days, to act on that infor­ma­tion.
With its pro­posed speed and range, the Falcon project — co-​​sponsored by the Air Force and Darpa, the Pentagon’s research arm — aims to make just about the whole world a dan­ger­ous place to be a bad guy.
“When Osama’s bad brother Larry shows up sud­denly in Niger, this is some­thing we can tar­get him with imme­di­ately,” said Daniel Goure, a mil­i­tary ana­lyst at the Lexington Institute, a think tank in Arlington, Virginia.
My Wired News arti­cle has details on the Falcon effort.
THERE’S MORE: A German mis­sile sys­tems com­pany, Lenkflugkrpersysteme, “has for the first time con­ducted a test fir­ing of a hyper­sonic mis­sile sur­pass­ing Mach 7,” says Jane’s International Defence Review. “But the fir­ing, on 23 October at Germany’s Meppen prov­ing range, may be the last in LFK’s hyper­sonic mis­sile devel­op­ment pro­gram now that the German defense min­istry has with­drawn all fund­ing as of January 2004, the company’s new tech­nolo­gies and stud­ies chief engi­neer Peter Gleich has told IDR.” An LFK press release about the event is here.
AND MORE: In the 60’s, Defense Tech pal Jim Lewis notes, the U.S. built a drone that could go Mach 3 — and even flew it over China a few times.
AND MORE: Air Force fore­cast­ers pre­dict that by 2015, America’s foes will be able to keep most U.S. planes 250–300 nau­ti­cal miles away. That’s one of the rea­sons that Air Force is so keen on Falcon, accord­ing to a recent Inside the Air Force report.

November 20th, 2003 | Missiles | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.