Out Of The Shadows: The Pentagon's Strategic Capabilities Office

In February, Carter revealed the SCO’s pursuit of an “arsenal plane,” which allows frontline fighters to launch weapons from an undisclosed heavy ordnance carrier flying at the back of a pack via an airborne fire-control network. He also revealed the development of micro-drones that can be dispensed from a fighter aircraft traveling at Mach 0.9, and the firing of subcaliber hypervelocity projectiles—originally intended for electromagnetic railguns—from Army howitzers and 5-in. Navy cannons for defense against missile raids. Carter added that the SCO has tweaked Raytheon’s shipborne, aircraft-killing Standard Missile-6 to destroy enemy vessels, and is also installing anti-ship seekers on the Raytheon Tomahawk Land Attack Missile and Lockheed Martin-built Army Tactical Missile System (ATacMS).

Satellite-guided weapons forever changed warfare by replacing mass bombardments with precision strikes. But with so many munitions now dependent on GPS for guidance, what happens if the signal is disrupted, jammed or those satellites are destroyed? The SCO has proposed low-cost seekers—produced from smartphone-class camera components. The office intends to demonstrate it first with the Boeing GBU-39 Small-Diameter Bomb and regular Joint Direct Attack Munitions. Captive-carry tests to validate the software and hardware on a surrogate aircraft have already taken place prior to flight demonstrations in 2017, Roper says.

If successful, the Air Force could choose to procure it as an upgrade kit for weapons that are solely reliant on GPS-aided inertial navigation for guidance. The tests will confirm if the seeker can steer the weapon to within meters of an intended target, and if so, there is high likelihood the advanced navigation kit will transition into a program of record, Roper said in August. “We’ll take the data back from those Small-Diameter Bomb tests and then anchor our models for how it could be applied to other weapons,” he says. “If everything goes well, I think it has a high potential to transition.”

The most recent the SCO revelation came on Oct. 28 during Carter’s speech at a Defense Department-sponsored Third Offset Strategy in Washington. There, he announced that the Army Tactical Missile System designed in the late-1980s would receive a new seeker for targeting ships some 186 mi. (300 km) off the coast.

With its budget and force size a fraction of what is was during the military buildup in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2009, the Army has been looking for more ways to contribute beyond traditional land warfare. With the Air Force and Navy now providing the bulk of firepower against the Islamic State militant group in Iraq and Syria, the Army is pursuing a new doctrine dubbed multidomain battlefield, where Army will fight across the land, air, sea, space and cyber domains. It is in this new doctrinal reality that the 24-in.-dia. “Multidomain ATacMS” missile comes into play.

Roper says the SCO has been working with the ATacMS program office for a couple of years to find a seeker that will allow the long-serving, GPS-guided missile to strike moving and stationary targets on land and at sea, even without a satellite signal. He says it should not come as any surprise, given the number and variety of seekers now in development, that ATacMS would be modified to hit sea targets. The Lockheed-made weapon is launched from the twin-shot M270 and single-shot M142 artillery rocket vehicles.

The pursuit of revolutionary technologies such as lasers and electromagnetic railguns has been a long and expensive affair, but sometimes new technologies spin out faster than the weapons themselves. Such is the case for the Office of Naval Research’s Hyper-Velocity Projectile, a low-drag, high-speed guided projectile designed to be shot from an electromagnetic railgun at seven times the speed of sound to destroy targets up to 100 mi. away. The SCO is investigating whether this sleek bullet could be fired from traditional “power guns,” namely the Paladin 155-mm self-propelled howitzer or 5-in. Mk. 45 Naval gun.

By wrapping the subcaliber projectile in an expendable sabot made from lightweight composite materials, it fits neatly inside the barrel of traditional guns. The concept was successfully demonstrated earlier this year with the fastest ever shot from a howitzer. “With Army and Navy artillery experts, we’ve improved our assessment of what powder guns can do by firing this pretty snazzy smart projectile,” Roper says. “When rail guns field in the future, we already have a ton of operational experience with the round, which has a role today.”

As the Navy resumes production of its heavy-hitting MK-48 submarine-launched torpedo, the SCO has proposed several classified design changes that will give it improved performance against enemy boats. “We are partnering with the Navy to build a higher-risk, higher-payoff variant with advanced propulsion, modular payloads and classified capabilities, enabling this undersea workhorse to go further and do more,” Roper stated in written testimony to Congress earlier this year.

The MK-48 was designed in the 1960s and fielded in the 1970s and the Hughes company produced an “advanced-capability” variant in the 1980s. The latest type—called MK-48 Mod 7 Common Broadband Advanced Sonar System, and produced by Lockheed Martin as an upgrade kit for the U.S. and Australia—achieved initial operational capability in 2006. In 2015, the Navy announced that production of new torpedoes would resume to meet operational requirements. Measuring 21-in. in diameter and weighing 3,520 lb., the torpedo upgrades will likely include an increase in speed beyond the current 28 kt. with an improved or replaced pumpjet engine and a new high-explosive, multi-effects warhead.

For the U.S. Air Force’s premier fighter aircraft, the Lockheed Martin F-22 and F-35, stealth comes at the expense of payload capacity. To maintain their low-observable characteristics when flying into hostile combat zones guarded by many surface-to-air missiles, all weapons needed for a mission must be stored internally.

In stealth mode, the F-22 carries six AIM-120 Amraams and two AIM-9X Sidewinders, or dual AIM-120s and AIM-9Xs when making room for two 1,000-lb. smart bombs. The F-35 can carry up to 18,000 lb. of ordnance internally and on its wings, but this is reduced to two air-to-air missiles and two smart bombs when it flies covertly. Enter the SCO’s “Arsenal Plane,” a hefty, non-stealthy linebacker that launches weapons from beyond the range of enemy interceptors and missiles. This flying bomb truck would be linked to the F-22 and F-35 and other forward sensors over an airborne network to receive dynamic targeting information, allowing fewer aircraft to wreak more havoc. The SCO will demonstrate the capability on an as-yet-unspecified cargo or bomber aircraft, likely the Lockheed Martin C-130H or Boeing B-52H.

“The arsenal plane idea has been around for a long time, and it makes tons of sense,” Roper says. “In the Navy, you have a distributed, integrated fire-control network that can perform better than individual, isolated ships. It makes sense it could work in the air domain. Looking across the airplanes we have, we’re very likely to have one that can do the job. Once we have it, we’re likely to unveil it.”

In ancient Greek mythology, Perdix was saved from sure death by transforming into a small bird when his jealous uncle, Daedalus, pushed him from a tower. That was the inspiration behind one prized SCO innovation, the Perdix microdrone, a surveillance device that is “kicked out” of a fighter’s flare dispenser at high subsonic speeds.

The design has gone through seven iterations and been demonstrated hundreds of times in flight from Boeing F/A-18s and Lockheed F-16s during combat exercises. When launched by the pilot at the press of a button, these swarmbots fall until they “wake up and find each other” via networking before flying off to perform their programmed surveillance mission below the cloud deck. “We’ve done more than 500 flights of the [unmanned aerial vehicle] now,” says Roper. “We’re always improving the design, as it’s a commercially based product. We build 40 or 50 in one lot, and by the time we’ve tested them, we already have the next design we’re building through 3-D printing and agile manufacturing. It’s an example of a [Defense Department] project where we’re starting to follow industry’s lead of continual improvement and testing.” If Perdix proves its operational worth in upcoming combat exercises, the program could move into production for use by fast jets.

Few missiles at sea are deadlier to aircraft than Raytheon’s Standard Missile-6, which combines the active seeker of its AIM-120C7 Amraam with the long-serving standard missile airframe. But when it was used this year to sink the USS Reuben James, a decommissioned Clemson-class destroyer, the naval fleets of Russia and China probably took note. Behind the project was the SCO, which partnered with the Navy to demonstrate the “distributed lethality” capabilities of the SM-6 weapon system through a few clever tweaks, essentially making it a triple threat against enemy aircraft, terminal-phase ballistic missiles and now ships. Produced at Raytheon’s plant at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, the missile was first deployed operationally in 2013. The Navy is planning to buy upward of 600 SM-6s, meaning it will also have 600 anti-ship weapons. “A lot of what you see publicly [from the SCO] is driven by high-end [conflict], like the repurposing of SM-6,” Roper says. “I hold that up as a fielded example. We fielded that very quickly with the support of the Navy.” SM-6 is a key feature of the Navy’s Naval Integrated Fire Control-Counter Air battle network.

The Raytheon Tomahawk Land Attack Missile (TALM) has served the Navy as a conventional and nuclear armament since its introduced in the 1980s, but a new seeker proposed by the SCO will allow it to target enemy ships at sea. The long-range, subsonic device is launched from U.S. submarine and surface vessels, with the latest variant being the networked Block IV variant. The SCO has been working with the Navy to demonstrate new guidance options under the “Strike-Ex project,” and the Navy intends to spend up to $430 million installing new anti-ship seekers and processors on up to 245 Tomahawks as it also searches for a long-term successor for fielding in the "2028-30 timeframe” under the Next-Generation Land Attack Weapon program.

The Navy has not had an anti-ship Tomahawk since the 300-mi.-range, active-radar-homing Tomahawk Anti-Ship Missile was discarded in the 1990s. “This is not your grandfather’s Tomahawk,” says Ron Jenkins, Raytheon’s director of stand-off strike programs. “We’ll have a Tomahawk missile that can strike land targets as well as go after the challenging maritime targets at extreme range, so we’re talking in excess of 900 mi. for the maritime-strike Tomahawk, giving Tomahawk the ability to enter the offensive antisurface warfare fight.”

The SCO sees untapped potential in Raytheon’s ADM-160 Miniature Air Launched Decoy, a Pratt & Whitney TJ-150-powered cruise missile that acts as a stand-in decoy and electronic attack jammer. It uses signature augmentation technology to replicate the radar cross-section of Western combat jets as a way of making enemy early-warning radars think more fighters are inbound than actually are, or waste million-dollar missiles on phony targets. The decoys are launched from bombers and fighter jets and can also be dropped out of the back of cargo aircraft. The latest variant adds an electronic-attack capability to disrupt enemy radars. The SCO has proposed a “super version” of MALD dubbed MALD-X, which networks the weapon via data link and installs a new type of electronic-warfare payload. It will also be able to cruise at low altitudes to evade radar detection if needed. The SCO’s design builds upon on the existing model and meets the Navy’s requirement for a networked “MALD-N.”

“This was a program with lots of potential but stagnated,” Roper explained after a Center for Strategic and International Studies event in Washington earlier this year. “We’ve been with it for two years, and we’re going to try to build a super version of it. We put an 'X' in it because we’re going do some really boundary-pushing technology, and we want to make it work for multiple services. We have a lot of options at our disposal.”