The US Navy has put its hypersonic-stopper missile on fighters. But there’s a problem
Story by David Axe • 1h
© Provided by The Telegraph
The RIM-174 Standard Missile-6, or SM-6 for short, might be the US military’s most versatile missile. It’s normally fired from a US Navy warship’s vertical launch cells, but recently it’s been seen for the second time under the wing of a fighter jet. The SM-6 could be on the cusp of becoming even more versatile.
America may be solving the wrong problem here, however. There’s an argument to be made that the military should be spending every available dollar buying additional SM-6s, rather than making more ships and planes able to fire off the currently limited number in the US arsenal.
“If the Navy does not have enough missiles to sustain a fight in the western Pacific, the numbers of available vertical-launch-system cells or long-range anti-ship-missile-capable aircraft is meaningless,” Jack Montgomery, a US Navy cadet, wrote in an award-winning essay.
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