China Panic, The US Army and Navy Combines Two Weapons Become Deadly Missile

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China panic the u.s army combines two very different navy weapons into one deadly missile. 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 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 and critical technologies office RCCTO statement released this afternoon.

The army will leverage navy contract vehicles for missile procurement in support of the army integration OT other transaction authority agreement. Lockheed Martin won the Ota contract worth up to 339.4 million dollars 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.

Lockheed builds the current wheeled HIMARS (High Mobility Artilery Rocket System) and track 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. The subsonic tomahawk cruise missile is the long-serving mainstay of long-range strike. It was first fielded in the reagan era and has been much upgraded since with more than two thousand fired in combat since 1991.

There used to be a whole family of different versions but nuclear-tipped, land-based, air-launched and anti-ship variants were retired after the cold war. That left the navy's conventional warhead Tomahawk Land Attack Missile (TLAM) which can only be fired from ships and submarines and only at stationary targets ashore. But in recent years anxiety over the growing chinese fleet led the pentagon to build a new anti-ship model the maritime strike tomahawk MSM.

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. 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. But the new SM-6 is also capable of striking surface targets on land and sea. The SM-6 selection surprised me at first because its reported ranges are well short of the 1000 miles the army wants for the mid-range capability.

Why mix both SM-6 and tomahawk in the same unit? Part of the answer is probably cost. Tomahawk is relatively affordable at about 1.4 million dollars each are perhaps 2.5 million dollars for the anti-ship variant. The current model of SM-6 is nearly 5 million dollars and the hypersonic extended range SM-61B will no doubt cost more. 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 other benefit is tactical the tomahawks come in relatively low and slow, trying to get under radar while the SM-6s fly high and fast. A missile defense that stops one may not stop the other complicating the enemy's countermeasures. Both 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. In the longer run however the army may well develop a new weapon for the MRC role perhaps derived from Darpa's hypersonic op fires experiment.