WASHINGTON\u00a0\u2014\u00a0The Strategic Capabilities Office believes it can upgrade the Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) weapon to allow it to strike moving targets on both land and water, Pentagon officials announced Friday.
ATACMS is a long-range, surface-to-surface munition. Primarily used by the US Army, other customers include South Korea, Greece, Bahrain, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, according to a Lockheed Martin fact sheet, which also claims 3,700 ATACMS missiles have been produced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Frank Kendall, the Pentagon\u2019s top acquisition official, later told reporters that the development is still in the experimental phase; “so what I think we will presumably put into the [fiscal 2018] budget is the early stage experimentation, the prototyping,” he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
William Roper, the SCO head, clarified that the program has yet to be tested\u00a0\u2014\u00a0but said he expects the upgrade, which involves adding a seeker to the missile, should be a fairly easy one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“I think you can all imagine we\u2019re very likely to succeed on this because we have all the technologies on hand and it\u2019s just a question of if we\u2019re lucky and they\u2019ll fit together, Frankenstein-style, or whether there is some peculiarity of the missile that makes integrating a seeker on it difficult,” Roper told reporters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He added that the program has been underway for more than a year and is probably still a year away from testing. How much that testing costs will depend on how many live shots the Army desires, Roper noted. He also acknowledged that the idea for the program was partly related to concerns about using weapons in GPS-denied locations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Right now, GPS is a singular option for many of our weapons. In the future I want to try and make every weapon have multiple options to get to the end game, and having a seeker is a secondary way to do that aside from GPS,” he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n
Swarming Development?<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n
For several years, the Pentagon has emphasized swarming capabilities for unmanned systems as a major technological step forward. The SCO has focused on the technology, in part through its Perdix program, which features small, swarming unmanned systems launched from a fighter jet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As part of his speech, Carter teased a breakthrough in SCO\u2019s research into swarming unmanned systems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“As some of you know, I created SCO in 2012 when I was deputy secretary of defense, and earlier this year, I lifted the veil on several of its projects that we\u2019re investing in, such as the arsenal plane, a new anti-ship capability for the SM-6 missile, and swarming drones on the sea and in the air,” Carter said in his speech. “In fact, this technology took a large step forward this week. You\u2019ll be hearing more about it in the months to come.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Kendall declined to comment further, as did a Pentagon spokesman. Roper himself described the swarming announcement as a “big step,” but said it is a “domain agnostic” development.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But in his speech, Roper gave a hint as to why they may be staying mum at the moment. Asked how to deal with adversaries that are already trying to offset the third offset, Roper said the answer was simple\u00a0\u2014\u00a0don\u2019t let them know everything that is going on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“You just don\u2019t talk about your best capabilities, plain and simple. So one of the things we have to remember, which we did well in the Cold War, is having a good balance about the capabilities we show to the world for deterrence” versus what is kept hidden, he said. “We are keeping our best ideas behind the door, and probably always will, because what we owe to our future operators is an unfair fight.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That is in comparison for why Carter decided to bring the ATACMS program, still in a fairly early stage, to light. With the Army program, Roper noted that several top officials, including Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley and US Pacific Command head Adm. Harry Harris had expressed the belief that the Army need to be able to provide cross-domain fires in the future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“We thought enough senior leaders [were] saying this [so] it\u2019s time to show this isn\u2019t just a theoretical idea,” Roper said. “It\u2019s something we can potentially get to quickly with what we already have.”<\/p>\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The ATACMS design is in prototype, but the swarming breakthrough is a mystery for now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":65893,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":14,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":{"2":{"categories":["news"],"primary_category":"news"},"5":{"categories":["news"],"primary_category":"news"},"7":{"categories":["news"],"primary_category":"news"}}},"categories":[11,14,48],"tags":[],"coauthors":[3378],"class_list":["post-44079","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-global","category-land","category-the-americas"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"5CF3T5DC7FHIXI4Z4OKBOIJPZQ","arc_canonical_url":"\/land\/2016\/10\/28\/anti-naval-atacms-big-swarming-breakthroughs-from-strategic-capabilities-office\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n