New Missile Kills Air Defenses DEAD

Photo: Raytheon HARM missile.

From Wired News:

A deadly-effective supersonic missile, designed to take out enemy air defenses, is getting a major upgrade to make it even more lethal than before. I have an article in this month's Defense Technology International about it.

Soon after radar-guided anti-aircraft missiles became a threat, planners realized that the simplest way to stop them was to take out the radar. These radars make an easy target; in radio terms, they are equivalent to lighthouses, radiating brightly. So in 1958 the U.S. introduced the Shrike, an "Anti-Radiation Missile" that homed in on enemy radar and proved invaluable in the Vietnam War. The modern successor is the AGM-88 HARM High Speed Antiradiation missile, which has longer range and a speed of over mach 2. "No U.S. aircraft has ever been lost to surface-to-air missiles when HARM has been flying cover," Mike Vigue, HARM Growth Manager at Raytheon, told me.

Read more ....

My Comment: The technology behind GPS has not only made our lives easier, but it has also revolutionized warfare. It has also made the satellites that make this technology possible a legitimate target. In one way .... someone can successfully argue that we have successfully weaponized space by circumventing the treaties that ban the use of space as a platform to launch a conflict and/or be used in a conflict.

With the exception of Russia and China, the use of GPS technologies has given the high ground to the U.S. ..... and with more deadlier and accurate missiles have shifted the strategic balance in favour of the U.S.. I can only presume that within a few short years, missile technology will evolve to the point where a high speed missile launched from a place can strike a target hundreds of miles away with deadly accuracy all within a few minutes. No one is remotely close with the hardware and tech to do this.