This legacy of Carter’s goes well beyond specific missiles. And it is Carter’s Strategic Capabilities Office that helped upgrade the SM-6, designed as an anti-aircraft and missile defense weapon, to strike surface targets such as ships and ground troops. The Mid-Range Capability, in fact, takes a Carter-esque approach by repurposing Cold War-vintage naval missiles, the Tomahawk and the SM-6, for launch from land. For example, when the Army moved away from the upgraded ATACMS, it did so not out of any distaste for anti-ship missiles, but to focus on much longer-ranged weapons, like the new Precision Strike Missile (PrSM) and Mid-Range Capability (MRC), which will also get anti-ship upgrades. (Sydney Freedberg photo for Breaking Defense)īut the broader strategic direction has persisted and even gained momentum. And while Carter’s institutional innovations - like the Defense Innovation Unit, the Defense Digital Service, and the Strategic Capabilities Office - have endured, they’ve been niche capabilities rather than revolutions.ĭefense Secretary Ashton Carter speaks at the official opening of Defense Innovation Unit (Experimental) Boston in 2016. An anti-ship (and anti-Chinese Navy) variant of the Reagan-era Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) died off in 2020. The “arsenal plane,” an attempt to turn aging, unstealthy airframes into missile carriers, still putters along in inconclusive experiments. The Hyper-Velocity Projectile (HVP), meant to fire from conventional artillery so fast that it could intercept incoming missiles, was cancelled last year. “Over the last 10 years,” a Pentagon spokesman emailed reporters Thursday, “37 SCO capabilities have been delivered to the warfighter and nine capabilities are in operational use.”Īdmittedly, many of Carter’s specific initiatives petered out, including some highly touted by this website. And he reinforced the Strategic Capabilities Office - which he had created in an earlier tour as deputy secretary back in 2012 - to rush new tech into service and repurpose legacy weapons for new missions. Carter kicked off a host of projects to bring in civilian tech-sector best practices, like bug bounties, and to upgrade legacy weapons for new missions. “The first is in Europe, where we’re taking a strong and balanced approach to deter Russian aggression….The second is in the Asia-Pacific, where China is rising.”Ĭarter’s request highlighted limited but significant seed-corn investments in crucial technologies, like $7 billion for cyber operations, $8 billion for submarines, $71 billion for R&D writ large. “Two of these challenges reflect a return to great power competition,” Carter declared in 2016. Within a year, however, Carter’s team - of course, with White House guidance - had crafted the first Pentagon budget request explicitly focused on countering Moscow and China, a focus enshrined in the following year’s National Defense Strategy. (Sydney Freedberg photo for Breaking Defense)Ĭonfirmed as secretary in February 2015 after a lovefest of a Senate hearing - albeit not as Obama’s first choice - Carter inherited a military still fighting intensely with Islamic extremists in Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq still rushing to reposition itself in Europe after Russia’s seizure of Crimea and the eastern Donbas the year before and still struggling to execute the “ pivot to the Pacific” that the Obama Administration had proclaimed back in 2012. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and Singaporean defence minister Ng Eng Hen watch a P-8 scout plane’s sensor crew over the South China Sea in 2016.
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