The United States needs to improve its ability to detect cruise missiles fired at the homeland during a surprise attack from a boat, container ship or person on the ground, a key U.S. Army general said Oct. 5.
“It’s not our ability to respond that I’m concerned about with cruise missiles,” said Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan, commander of U.S. Army North (Fifth Army), whose roles include homeland defense. “It’s our ability to see them far enough away to enable the full range of responses. I want to be able to see cruise missiles from farther away so that we can employ a full range of options to defeat them.”
Photo: Army
After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the military fielded a “robust” mix of fighter jets and ground-based systems to defend the nation’s capital against certain airborne threats, such as a hijacked civilian airliner. But cruise missiles “are a different problem,” Buchanan told the Defense Writers Group. “Because they’re flying so fast, it narrows our series of options. We can’t see them far enough out to employ all of the things that we could against a fixed aviation manned system to be able to defeat it.”
The Army’s Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System (JLENS) was designed to provide such long-distance monitoring, but its fate became uncertain after one of the program’s unmanned, tethered, balloon-like aerostats broke free at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland and drifted into Pennsylvania last year. Congress is considering deep funding cuts to the program, whose prime contractor is Raytheon [RTN].
While the Army insists that it still needs a JLENS-like capability, it is unclear what that capability will look like. “There are all different kinds of ways that you could potentially get after this problem,” Buchanan said. For example, “you could have sea-based radars that could do the same thing” as JLENS.
In July, a Raytheon spokesman said that the company “continues to work with the U.S. government on next steps for the JLENS program. We remain confident in the system’s capabilities to defend the homeland against an evolving cruise missile threat.”