The Drive:

The Missile Defense Agency, together with the U.S. Navy, plan to test an SM-6 missile against an “advanced maneuvering threat,” a term that has been used in relation to unpowered hypersonic boost-glide vehicles, later this year. The Pentagon says that unspecified versions of the SM-6 have already demonstrated some degree of capability against these types of weapons, examples of which Russia and China have already begun putting to service. A new variant of the SM-6, the Block IB, is already under development and will itself be able to reach hypersonic speeds.

Barbara McQuiston, a senior U.S. official currently performing the duties of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, including mention of the scheduled SM-6 test in her testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee’s Subcommittee on Defense yesterday. The aim of the hearing was to give Senators on the subcommittee an update on Department of Defense innovation and research efforts, broadly.

“MDA [the Missile Defense Agency], in cooperation with the U.S. Navy, demonstrated early capability against maneuvering threats during flight-testing of the Standard Missile (SM)-6 Sea-Based Terminal (SBT) defense, and it will further demonstrate this capability against an advanced maneuvering threat-representative target later this year,” according to McQuiston’s written testimony. “We will continue to advance our SBT capability to address the regional hypersonic threat and will test that capability in the FY 2024 timeframe”…


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