Breaking Defense:
WASHINGTON: Three weeks from today, defense contractors will submit proposals for spotting hidden missile launchers — so the US military can destroy them before they ever fire. The winning entries could go on to flight demonstrators in just two years, a meteoric pace for the Pentagon.
It’s the first concrete step towards implementing the much-debated Missile Defense Review released last month, which called for an ambitious and expensive array of high-tech countermeasures, not just to usual suspects Iran and North Korea, but to the much larger arsenals of Russia and China.
Outlined in a document blandly titled “Time-Sensitive Target Mission Payloads Demonstration” that was posted without fanfare on the federal government’s main contracting website Feb. 15, the plan describes acquiring a variety of satellites and surveillance assets to find and track often hard-to-find mobile missile launchers that can be hit before they pop off their first missile.
