Breaking Defense:
Vladimir Putin recently showed off an animated film of Russia attacking the United States while bragging about Russia’s supposed new nuclear missile capabilities. Adding insult to injury, according to him, the new Russian missiles are so complex that the United States can’t defend against them.
Well, not quite. Last weekend Defense Secretary Jim Mattis clarified that the Russian capabilities are years away from being operational. Besides, Russia’s current arsenal can already reach our allies and the U.S. homeland, and it’s not hard to evade a defensive system that isn’t trained on your weapons in the first place.
But that could be changing soon, at least to some degree, against some Russian missile threats. Step one is to deploy a serious space sensor layer to provide persistent birth-to-death tracking of missiles, including against the kind that rip through the air at low altitudes 20 times the speed of sound (hypersonics).
