REAL MISSILE DEFENSE DELAYED

While the U.S. mil­i­tary rushes to switch on its bal­lis­tic mis­sile defense sys­tem, the Pentagon’s pro­gram for com­bat­ing cruise mis­siles is in deep trou­ble, Aviation Week reports. And it may not get bet­ter for a long, long time to come.
China, Iran, and Syria are among the coun­tries build­ing up big arse­nals of land-​​based cruise mis­siles, which are seen by some ana­lysts as a big­ger threat to American secu­rity than any bal­lis­tic dan­ger. That’s mostly because the mis­siles are so easy to obtain. “For the price of two fight­ers or four attack heli­copters a coun­try can buy about 40 cruise mis­siles,” Aviation Week notes.
The Patriot mis­sile defense sys­tem is sup­posed to pro­vide some pro­tec­tion against the threat. But the Patriot’s track record is iffy. And Patriots are expen­sive — $2 to $3 mil­lion per shot.
So the Defense Department wants a smaller, more mobile, more accu­rate, cheaper solu­tion. And it wants the sys­tem by the end of the decade.
But it ain’t gonna hap­pen, Aviation Week says. The Patriot’s replace­ment, the Medium Extended Air Defense System, now isn’t sched­uled to come online until 2015.
It’s one of a whole lot of hur­dles the Pentagon is going to face as it tries to stop cruise mis­sile attacks, says Victoria Samson, with the Center for Defense Information.
“I think what we are going to find out is that bal­lis­tic mis­sile defense is a cake­walk com­pared to cruise mis­sile defense,” she tells Defense Tech. Tracking bal­lisitic mis­siles is hard. But “when you fac­tor in some­thing that is pow­ered, can fly low to the ground, and has a much lower radar cross sec­tion, the job gets much more dif­fi­cult. As we saw in [the Iraq war], when Iraq cob­bled together old Seersucker cruise mis­siles and used them over land (instead of over the water, as they were designed) against Coalition troops, not only did we not engage them with the Patriot, but we flat-​​out failed to pick them up on our radar.”

August 25th, 2004 | Missiles | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.