Analyst's note: Just a note to the wise, "leading from behind" does NOT work in war. This is especially true with the U.S. Fleet ... which has a very long replacement and hard time. Besides understandable concerns about China, the other possible players in this scenario are, of course, Russia, Iran and North Korea, or some combination.
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Mystery Weapon Terrifies America’s Admirals
Somewhere out there, someone has built something that has the Navy absolutely freaked
The U.S. has the biggest, baddest Navy in the world by a wide margin. But a new and dangerous mystery weapon has America’s admirals scared.
That’s according to a recent approval for up to $65 million over three years from the Naval Research Laboratory to defense contractor ITT Exelis. The funds, according to a Navy document, are for a suite of 24 electronic warfare systems to be mounted on U.S. warships sailing near Chinese waters.
The reason? It’s “necessary to thwart an immediate threat for naval fleet operations,” the Navy stated. The sailing branch wants the new defenses in place by March 2014.
The urgent notice, first spotted by Military & Aerospace Electronics, is an unusually stark warning for the planet’s mightiest fleet. Navy officials told the magazine the undisclosed danger is a “newly discovered threat,” which caused U.S. Pacific Fleet commander Adm. Cecil Haney to fast-track the project.
The Navy isn’t saying what the threat is, which country developed it or when it was discovered by the Americans. Requests to the Navy for comment were not returned.
But it’s possible to make informed guesses. As the trade magazine notes, “shipboard electronic warfare systems typically are designed to detect and jam enemy radar threats — particularly the electronics in radar-guided anti-ship missiles.” (Our emphasis.)
And it’s reasonably safe to assume if there’s a new missile out there, it’s Chinese.
[....] there’s a big push underway in China to build even newer and better ship-killing missiles. Beijing has been observed ramping-up use of special test-bed ships fitted with new sensors that could be satellite communications or fire control systems, or something else entirely.
All this activity on the other side of the Pacific has put the U.S. off its balance. “Don’t be too surprised if the Navy is scrambling to deploy in a hurry, as [the Americans] are chronically behind in EW system fleet upgrades across all three services, due to funding being diverted into [the global war on terrorism] or whatever label is attached these days,” Kopp says.
The Navy has for some time sensed that it’s been slipping offensively as well as defensively. In 2011 the Navy and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — the Pentagon’s blue-sky research agency — handed $218 million to Lockheed Martin to develop a new long-range anti-ship missile, or LRASM. The precise range is unknown and the missile won’t enter service for another two years, at the earliest.
Of course, that might not enough to deal with whatever else poses a threat to U.S. ships.
