Matrix Games Forums

ORIGINAL: Gneckes

What might be the reason for integrating the booster on the export version? Easier maintenance for foreign customers maybe?

ORIGINAL: Broncepulido

What's in the images the test-launching ship launching suppossed HQ-8?

ORIGINAL: mikmyk

We've gotten a flood of new things to add to the db as of late but will need to sort out the details.

Mike

WASHINGTON — The 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.

The program is under the purview of the Strategic Capabilities Office (SCO), which has also apparently advanced swarming drone technologies for both the air and sea domains, although details on just what that advancement is remains unclear.

Speaking at the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ forum on the third offset, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter was the first to mention the ATACMS upgrade.

“By integrating an existing seeker onto the front of the missile, they’re enabling it to hit moving targets, both on land and at sea,” Carter said. “With this capability, what was previously an Army surface-to-surface missile system can project power from coastal locations up to 300 kilometers into the maritime domain.”

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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.

“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.

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“You just don’t 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.”

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. "