U.S. wants
superfast drone for global strikes
Hypersonic vehicle could reach far-away targets in two
hours
Tuesday, July 1, 2003 Posted: 3:37 PM EDT (1937
GMT)
The technology is available, but developing such a platform would
take time and to do it in a huge rush would be extremely expensive.
Talking it up may be a way of getting Congressional funding.
-- Michael Codner, Royal United Services Institute for Defence and
Security Studies in London
BRUSSELS, Belgium (Reuters) -- The Pentagon is
planning to build a hypersonic unmanned drone which could strike
targets anywhere on earth from the continental United States in
under two hours, according to a Department of Defense Web
site.
Part of a drive for "prompt global reach capability" which has been
spurred by concern about threats from failed states and terrorism,
the drone would be able to take off from a conventional runway with
a 12,000-lb payload.
"This capability would free the U.S. military from reliance on
forward basing to enable it to react promptly and decisively to
destabilizing or threatening actions by hostile countries and
terrorist organizations," said the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency (DARPA).
About 20 years to develop
It said the military engagements in Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq
had underscored the limitations of the U.S. air force's strike
capabilities.
"While advancements in target identification and precision strike
have been abundantly demonstrated, deficiencies in engaging and
defeating time-critical and high-value, hard and deeply buried
targets have also been revealed," it said.
The need for such technology will be all the more necessary, the
agency said, because the "current and future international
political environment severely constrains this country's ability to
conduct long-range strike missions on high-value, time-critical
targets" from outside continental United States.
In other words, such technology would have been ideal for that
opening bid of the Iraq war to kill Saddam Hussein had the United
States been prevented, for diplomatic reasons, from operating from
outside its own territory.
Inviting bids from contractors to develop the technology, DARPA
said it would take over 20 years to develop the hypersonic cruise
vehicle (HCV), which would be able to deliver a range of munitions
to targets up to 9,000 miles (14,400 km) away.
Alternative planned
A near-term and cheaper option on the drawing board for the
Pentagon's Force Application and Launch from Continental United
States (FALCON) program is a small launch vehicle which could both
drop bombs and launch small military satellites into orbit.
These launchers, which the department envisages could be developed
by around 2010, could also launch glide vehicles to strike deeply
buried targets like bunkers with payloads of up to 1,000 lbs.
Michael Codner, director of military sciences at the Royal United
Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies in London, said
such projects are indeed within reach.
In recent years the U.S. military has begun to make extensive use
of slow-moving missile-armed Predator unmanned drones. In conflicts
in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq the short-range Predator hit
targets with pinpoint accuracy at low and medium altitudes.
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/ptech/07/01/arms.usa.reut/index.html