The U.S. military can count on facing guided missiles in its next high-end conflict, but it is not prepared to defend against massed, relatively inexpensive precision weapons.

A new study released Friday by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) posits that the U.S. military’s strategy of shooting down missiles with missiles is prohibitively expensive and does not provide adequate capacity to deal with dozens or hundreds of incoming threats.

Effective deterrence to enemy missile offensives will entail an integrated network of layered defenses that can shoot down multiple threats at a variety of ranges, preferably closer than traditionally desired, said Bryan Clark, former special assistant to the Chief of Naval Operations and submarine officer, now a senior fellow at CSBA.

“The U.S. military has never faced an adversary with its own precision strike capability. There is no one silver bullet that is going to solve the missile-defense challenge,” Clark said at a breakfast in Washington, D.C., marking the release of the study, titled “Winning the Salvo: Rebalancing America’s Air and Missile Defense.

An Evolved Seasparrow Missile is launched from the  USS Carl Vinson.  Photo: U.S. Navy.
An Evolved Seasparrow Missile is launched from the USS Carl Vinson. Photo: U.S. Navy.

“We need to have a combination of things that are kinetic and non-kinetic that work together to provide enough capacity to deal with the size of the salvos we’re likely to face against a country like a China or a Russia.”

“The problem is, PGM (precision guided munition) salvos that would include cruise missiles, air-delivered weapons as well as ground and sea-launched capabilities, you have to think in terms of salvos instead of one or two threats at a time,” CSBA Senior Fellow Mark Gunzinger said. “Frankly, the U.S. military right now is not well prepared to defeat large salvos of PGMs, despite buying more than $24 billion worth of surface-to-air interceptors over the last 15 years.”

U.S. theater air defense systems are best suited to dealing with small numbers of guided munitions launched by rogue states, like Iran or North Korea, not the massive missile assaults that a peer like China or Russia could deploy.

The Defense Department has invested heavily in ballistic missile defense that would destroy enemy warheads at standoff ranges. Gunzinger said the continued emphasis on long-range kinetic missile interceptors has put the military at a disadvantage because those defenses are expensive, one-shot solutions in an environment in which guided missiles are becoming more affordable and widespread.

“We’re not saying ‘Don’t do this,’” he said. “We are saying this is not efficient to handle large, multiple salvos that threaten our overseas bases.”

The Navy as a service has developed its own ship and fleet defenses against incoming cruise missiles, but that layered capability also depends largely on long-range kinetic interceptors. Ships have limited magazine capacity for missiles and therefore can shoot down only a finite number of incoming threats. A sophisticated enemy would know that number and send a plus-one anti-ship missile to destroy the ship, Gunzinger said.

Defensive weapons also displace offensive capabilities aboard ships, which weakens their punch, he added. A typical surface combatant today can shoot at about 100 air threats before exhausting its air-defense capabilities, Clark said. Some of those shots are bound to miss, so a ship is able to actually shoot down somewhere between 40 and 70 of 100 incoming threats.

“These limited loadouts can lead to situations where a naval surface combatant could, frankly, run out of defenses a couple days into a high-intensity fight with China or another state,” he said. “Once they do that, they have to return to a secure port to reload which could take days, perhaps weeks that they’re out of the fight.”

Engaging missiles at closer ranges with a variety of systems–swapping SM-2 for four ESSMs–and adding gun systems that use high-velocity projectiles, laser, high-powered microwaves and the Navy’s surface electronic warfare improvement program (SEWIP), a ship could engage 300-350 threats, Clark said.

The Missile Defense Agency and individual services should focus on less-expensive, short-range interceptors, like the Navy’s Evolved SaeSparrow Missile (ESSM) and its predecessor the RIM-7 SeaSparrow, Clark said. The Army also has promising short- and medium-range air defense potential in the indirect fire protection capability increment 2 (IFPC2) while the Air Force’s AIM-9X advanced Sidewinder also could take on an air-defense role, he said.

“Those interceptors are a lot less expensive and they’re smaller, so you can carry them in larger numbers, thus increasing capacity,” Clark said.

By destroying incoming missiles at a shorter range than traditionally sought–10-30 nautical miles instead of 100+ nautical miles–more weapons are capable of shooting them down. Closer ranges could bring guns to bear against incoming missiles, which adds capacity at a high rate and low cost, Clark said.

The Hypervelocity Projectile being developed by the Strategic Capabilities Office is a potential missile-defense capability at the 10-15 nautical mile range. Fired from an existing platform like a Paladin self-propelled gun, the 155mm high-velocity projectile is an affordable capability upgrade for legacy weapons.

“This provides you the ability to use the guns that we have in today’s fleet and the Army and Marine Corps, to do air defense,” Clark said. “It may not have a super-high probability of kill, but it’s high enough and you’ve got lots of them so you can get a pretty high capacity out of them.”

Non-kinetic air defenses that can spoof, defeat or destroy a missile’s seeker and internal electronics hold greater promise of affordability and rate of fire, Clark said.  A 300-500 kilowatt laser is able to kill incoming cruise missiles, though a laser of that power has not been built that is operationally feasible. High-powered microwave emitters could scramble or fry a missile’s brain or avionics controls.

Once effective missile defense technologies are in place, the whole arsenal must be networked together so the military can hand over detection, identification and targeting of threats to computers, Clark said.

“The key thing we’re going to have to do that’s going to change how we do missile defense today is we’re going to have to take the human out of the loop in a lot of ways,” Clark said. “We’re going to have to rely on an automated fire control system to allocate defensive systems against incoming weapons and then reallocate as these weapons come in because, guaranteed, they’re not going to get shot by the first system that encounters them…That’s all happening in fractions of second and I think we are fooling ourselves if we think we can do that with people.”