Future US Air Force missile: speeds up to Mach 6.5

The X-51A program could mean that long-range strikes take a fraction of the time needed now.

from the August 16, 2007 edition

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In the fight against terrorism, the US's most-wanted, such as Mr. bin Laden, are essentially moving targets. If bin Laden wants to have a meeting with his top lieutenants, for example, it will be called at the last minute and be short, intelligence officials say. That leaves the US military a small window in which to strike, posing a challenge to commanders and intelligence officials at the Air Force, which often oversees such operations. One option is to have missile assets in the area of the target already, perhaps by basing a bomber squadron in that region. Last year, when the Air Force zeroed in on a building where Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was meeting, it was able to get two F-16C Fighting Falcon jets near the target in time to get Mr. Zarqawi, considered the head of Al Qaeda in Iraq.

Other missiles, such as the Navy's Tomahawk cruise missile, which could be based farther away, require hours of planning. And once it gets in the air, it flies at less than the speed of sound – about 550 m.p.h. By then, the target could have slipped away.

"We've had some examples in Iraq where we've been able to do things quickly, but in other parts of the world where we'd be able to stand off at a distance and reach in, this would make an ideal weapon," Dr. Lewis says.

Because of the speed of the X-51A, it would dramatically compress the time needed for a commander to receive intelligence, prepare to deploy the weapon, and hit a target, analysts and military officials say.

"You're taking what could take a day and reducing it to a couple hours," says Chris Hellman, a military policy fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, a think tank and advocacy group in Washington.

The X-51A could also work as a deterrent, says Tom Ehrhard, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a think tank in Washington. "If a terrorist group had to worry about something like that coming in on their meeting area, that is something they would have to consider," says Mr. Ehrhard, a retired Air Force colonel who specialized in strategy for the service. And for more industrialized nations with their own air defense systems, the X-51A could effectively negate such systems, allowing US air power to get past them.

But Ehrhard warns that a "persistent" surveillance system would have to be part of the X-51A platform to make it effective. "It's very sexy to talk about a Mach 6.5, but you have to ask a lot of hard questions about how you turn that Mach 6.5 into an effective weapons system," he says.

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