Loren Thompson
Washington has sent over 1,400 Stinger antiaircraft missiles to Ukraine as part of the allied effort to prevent Russian occupation of the country.
That is a significant portion of the U.S. Army’s entire Stinger inventory, and it highlights the need to modernize the service’s short-range air defenses.
During the global war on terror that preoccupied the Army for more than a decade following the 9/11 attacks, tactical air defenses were neglected because the enemy did not have an air force.
However, with the shift of national defense strategy from counter-insurgency to deterring great power rivals, the Army has revived the air defense mission.
In fact, improved air and missile defense has become a pillar of the service’s modernization agenda. Army plans emphasize the value of layered defenses requiring weapons with diverse ranges, but in many tactical situations short-range weapons may be the only systems immediately available.
Today, that means Stinger. But Stinger is an old system, first designed in the 1970s, and despite improvements it is limited in speed and reach.
Russian drones overflying Ukraine reportedly are able to operate above the engagement “envelope” of Stingers, rendering them ineffectual.
But drones are just part of the challenge. What the Army needs is a mobile short-range air defense capability that can keep up with combat units and cope with diverse threats—fighter jets, rotorcraft, cruise missiles and, increasingly, drones.
Something better than the existing system is needed, and the Army is pursuing it under a multifaceted program called Maneuver Short Range Air Defense, or M-SHORAD.
The first step in the Army’s approach was to shift vehicle-mounted Stingers from vulnerable Humvees to the heavily-armored StrykerSYK -3.1% troop carrier. That effort is well under way, led by General DynamicsGD -0.7% Land Systems and the U.S. unit of Leonardo.
But that is just Increment 1 in a three-step program. The next step, Increment 2, will be to field a high-power laser on Stryker. And then Increment 3 will develop a missile with longer range and higher speed than Stinger to give defenders greater reach.
When all these steps are completed, M-SHORAD will provide a mobile, protected air defense vehicle equipped not only with something better than Stinger, but also Hellfire missiles, a 30mm cannon, and a machine gun.
But the new missile is key to the whole project, and the Army wants to begin fielding the missile no later than 2027.
The Army hasn’t fully clarified its acquisition strategy for the missile, but multiple industry teams are circling the opportunity, in part because 19 U.S. allies operate Stinger and therefore would be likely candidates to buy whatever successor the Army selects.
That raises the question of what precisely the Army should be seeking. It seems a half-dozen missile characteristics are essential to improving the service’s short-range air defenses.
First of all, the Army needs greater speed and range than an upgraded Stinger is capable of delivering, because the existing missile can’t cope with all the threats likely to be presented in the future by Russia and China.
Second, the new missile needs a better seeker than that currently resident on Stinger. An active seeker would probably be too expensive, but a more precise passive seeker operating in multiple segments of the spectrum is within the realm of the doable.
Third, whatever missile the Army selects must be compatible with the launch pods the Army is fielding under Increment 1 of the program. The service does not need to complicate its logistics and interoperability challenges by buying a missile that doesn’t fit in the launchers it is already using.
Fourth, the new missile needs a long shelf life and a design with growth potential since overhead threats will continue evolving. At its inception Stinger offered both of those features, but the threat has now progressed to a point where something more capable is needed.
Fifth, the new missile needs to be available soon. The Army has tentatively planned to begin fielding in 2027, but Russia’s invasion of Ukraine should be a wakeup call that there is no time to waste. The sooner Washington can start turning Taiwan into a “porcupine” that China is afraid to attack, the better.
Finally, the Army needs to have a real competition in which it avoids getting locked into the offerings of a specific vendor early on. The threat environment has become unpredictable, especially in Eastern Europe and the Western Pacific, so the service needs to investigate all the technological options available for achieving what it likes to call “overmatch.”
The latter goal inevitably leads to the requirement for an open-systems architecture in which the Army has maximum flexibility to adapt the weapon to new circumstances as they arise.
All of the competing teams will presumably offer proposals featuring digital engineering and rapid software development to demonstrate they are applying the latest techniques to their products. There’s nothing wrong with that, but the Army needs to keep in mind that this is an urgent warfighting requirement, not a science fair.
If it can short-circuit the process by adapting mature technologies already available in the weapons of sister services, it probably needs to pursue that path because time is of the essence.
The world in which U.S. soldiers will have to fight is not getting any safer.
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