US SecDef: missile defense howitzer, MEMS navs, swarming fast drones

[DocM]

Extracted from a very long tome by US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, BS removed. 

 

Missile defense by using a smart railgun round in a 5 inch or Paladin howitzer ?!?

 

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First is a project focused on advanced navigation.  What the SCO's doing is taking the same kinds of micro-cameras, sensors, MEMS [microelectromechanical systems], and so forth that are littered throughout our smartphones and everything today, and putting them on our small diameter bombs to augment the existing target capabilities on the SDB.  

This will eventually be a modular kit that will work with many other payloads, enabling off network targeting through commercial components, small enough to hold in your hand like your phone, and cheap enough to own like your phone.

 

Another project uses swarming autonomous vehicles in all sorts of ways and in multiple domains.  In the air, they develop micro-drones that are really fast, really resistant.  They can fly through heavy winds and be kicked out the back of a fighter jet moving at Mach 0.9, like they did during an operational exercise in Alaska last year, or they can be thrown into the air by a soldier in the middle of the Iraqi desert.  And for the water, they've developed self-driving boats which can network together to do all kinds of missions, from fleet defense to close-in surveillance, without putting sailors at risk.  Each one of these leverages the wider world of technology.  For example, the microdrones, I mentioned a moment ago, use a lot of commercial components and are actually 3-D printed and the boats build on some of the same artificial intelligence algorithms that long-ago and in a much more primitive form were on the Mars lander.

 

They've also got a project on gun-based missile defense, where we're taking some of the same hypervelocity smart projectiles that we developed for the electromagnetic gun.  That's the railgun.  And using it for point defense.  By firing it with artillery, we already have in our inventory, including the five-inch guns on the front of every Navy destroyer and also the hundreds of Army Paladin self-propelled howitzers.  In this way, instead of spending more money on more expensive interceptors or on new platforms, we can turn past offense into future defense – defeating incoming missile raids at a much lower cost per round and thereby imposing higher costs on an attacker.  In fact, we tested the first shots of the hypervelocity projectile out of a Paladin a little over a month ago, and we also found that it significantly increases the Paladin's range.
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And it not only buys nine of our most advanced Virginia-class attack submarines over the next five years; it also equips –more of them with the versatile Virginia Payload Module, which triples each submarine platform’s strike capacity from 12 Tomahawk missiles to 40.
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[Unobscured Vision]

Makes sense. The only issue I have with this is publishing this information for others to see. It gives potential opponents the ability to develop countermeasures against these defenses.

 

Honestly, are our Military leaders even using their heads anymore? ****'s sake. First rule of military power -- don't let your enemy know what you're thinking.

 

Rule two -- don't let them know what we have. 

 

Ugh. Thanks for the story, @DocM, but honestly I don't know what to make of their thought processes anymore. It's like they're asleep at the wheel now.

[Draggendrop Veteran]

Then again, one can leak data to the MSN to pacify and reinforce objectives, for the general populace. Then leak data via other sources to let others believe what you want them to, all the while doing what you need in relative secrecy at various lock down levels.

 

[Unobscured Vision]

1 hour ago, Draggendrop said:

Then again, one can leak data to the MSN to pacify and reinforce objectives, for the general populace. Then leak data via other sources to let others believe what you want them to, all the while doing what you need in relative secrecy at various lock down levels.

 

Problem is you'd better be able to back it up when push comes to shove. It can bite ya in the a-double-crooked-letter if all you're doing is blowing smoke and playing with pretty mirrors, especially if your opponent did develop the capability to deal with what you were fibbing about.

 

Not saying that the Military is doing that; just saying that it needs to be able to put its' money where its' mouth is.

[Draggendrop Veteran]

The smoke screen is for the "bow and arrow", while the gatling gun get's "polished".....

[Unobscured Vision]

Just now, Draggendrop said:

The smoke screen is for the "bow and arrow", while the gatling gun get's "polished".....

Sleight of hand, eh.

[Draggendrop Veteran]

You will never see the "good stuff" in the "skunk works daily".