New report urges US to look beyond cheap low-earth satellites for missile warning
Tracking hypersonic missiles across oceans is like trying to “find a cup of tea that you’ve dropped into a swimming pool.”
PATRICK TUCKER | DECEMBER 18, 2023 08:23 PM ET
Lots of cheap satellites in low-Earth orbit may not be enough to protect against Chinese and Russian hypersonic weapons, so the U.S. should broaden its missile-defense strategy by adding a variety of sensors—including drones, aircraft, and higher-orbit satellites, according to a new report from CSIS.
Despite the Pentagon's launch of several constellations in recent years, today's highly maneuverable hypersonics remain very difficult to track, especially across large bodies of water such as the South China Sea, one of the report’s authors said Monday.
“This problem is so challenging in part because hypersonic weapons are sub-pixel-size targets. They're smaller than the pixels used to actually image them, and so their signatures get diluted with all their surroundings. It's akin to trying to find a cup of tea that you've dropped into a swimming pool and figure out how hot it is,” Masao Dahlgren said at a CSIS event in Washington, D.C. “We don't get dense coverage near the equator. We get it near the poles.”
https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2023/12/new-report-urges-us-look-beyond-cheap-low-earth-satellites-missile-warning/392862/
