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| ATACMS Tactical Missile (Image: Wiki Commons) |
By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR
UPDATED with William Roper comments WASHINGTON: The Army’s long-range artillery rocket, ATACMS, will get upgraded to strike moving targets on land and at sea, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter announced today. After at least two years of pressure from Congress and vague promises from Pentagon leaders, and for the first time since the Coastal Artillery Corps was disbanded 66 years ago, the Army is officially back in the business of killing ships. That gives the largest service a big new role in countering Russian aggression in the Baltic and Black Seas or defending allies like the Philippines against China.
The project to upgrade the Lockheed-built ATACMS is sponsored by the Strategic Capabilities Office, created by Carter back in 2012 and headed by his protégé, Will Roper. (Our exclusive interview with Roper is here and here). SCO’s involvement, incidentally, explains why no one in the Army or industry told me this was happening, despite countless queries: SCO keeps secrecy locked tight — its very existence was classified at first — unless and until they decide the deterrent value of letting adversaries know about a weapon in peacetime outweighs the tactical value of surprising them with it in wartime.
“How you offset the adversaries trying to offset your offset? It’s very simple to do that, you just don’t talk about your best capabilities,” Roper said today at a Center for Strategic and International Studies panel. “We are keeping our best ideas behind the door and probably always will.”
“We thought it was important to come out (in public) with ATACMS for the Army because there’s been a lot of writing, a lot of speeches, on the need for the Army to go cross-domain,” Roper elaborated to reporters after the panel. Army leaders from Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley on down, and even other services’ leaders like Pacific Command chief Adm. Harry Harris, have publicly called for the Army to extend its reach out to sea, crossing traditional boundaries between what Pentagon doctrine calls the land and sea domains. So, said Roper, “it’s time for us to show it isn’t just a theoretical idea, it’s something we can potentially get to quickly with something that we already have.”
Read the full story at Breaking Defense