New beginning: Will the US create a small and stinging ‘like a bee’ missile?

By TOC

WASHINGTON – It seems that the American defense again wants to set itself a task, the implementation of which has been “under great question” from the very beginning, learned BulgarianMilitary.com.

The US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) wants to have small missiles with a range of hundreds of kilometers in its arsenal. To be more precise, this must be a high-precision cruise missile with a range of at least 370 km, and ideally more than 700 km, says The Drive.

This missile should carry a warhead weighing at least 6 kg, but ideally, USSOCOM is interested in structures that can withstand a payload of up to 16.7 kg.

The missile must also be equipped with an electro-optical and infrared self-targeting system, but the command will also consider projects with additional targeting options, if possible, that will allow the weapons to “detect and/or re-capture targets in the air.”

According to USSOCOM, such missiles could, for example, give AC-130J Ghostrider fighter jets the ability to hit targets while out of range of enemy air defenses.

What exactly should be the missiles in USSOCOM?

not specified, but it is known that it must be compact enough to work with the Common Launch Tube (CLT), so the potential developer of such a missile will have to solve a difficult task: to create a fairly miniature long-range missile and significant payload for such dimensions.

US and Australia will build hypersonic missiles

Cooperation between the US and Australian Ministries of Defense will allow the acquisition of new hypersonic missiles shortly, as we reported on September 6.

The United States and Australia are constantly working to develop a hypersonic cruise missile under the Southern Cross Integrated Flight Science Experiment [SCIFiRE] program. As Breaking Defense writes, the aforementioned SCIFiRE should be read as a natural derivative of Allied hypersonic propulsion efforts dating back to 2007. The Americans and Australians focused on this potentially breakthrough technology as part of the International Hypersonic Flight Research Experiment [HIFiRE] project. At the same time, it is emphasized that the potential development of SCIFiRE would be an ideal bridge project before the development of the DARPA concept as part of hypersonic technologies

The new hypersonic missile itself will go to equip aircraft currently used by the armed forces of both countries and will carry a warhead with a conventional payload. As Breaking Defense reported, contracts for the next phase of the program have been awarded to Boeing and Lockheed Martin, but it is still possible that Raytheon will also be admitted to the next phase.

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