Brien Alkire, George Nacouzi, Jair Aguirre & Brian Dolan
Introduction
Background and Motivation
There is broad consensus in the Department of Defense on the need to increase long-range strike capacity, and as a result, the U.S. Army, Navy and Air Force are increasing the range, effectiveness, and capacity of their “kill chain” capabilities needed to find, fix, track, and attack targets over long ranges (that is, beyond line-of-sight of the shooter).2 Consider an air-launched cruise missile strike to a target over a long range. It may have been provided uncertain information about the target location, speed and heading. Also, the target may change its speed and heading. Errors in the targeting location of the target will accumulate over the flight time of the missile, so it may be advantageous to provide in-flight target updates (IFTU) to the missile from another platform such as an aircraft, or more likely a satellite. Also, the missile may be getting updates about its own position from an external source such as global positioning system (GPS). But an adversary might attempt to disrupt or deny3 GPS position updates and IFTU to the missile by jamming the receivers on the missile. Alternatively, an adversary might disrupt or deny those updates by kinetically or non-kinetically attacking the satellites or aircraft that are the sources of the information. The missile would then rely on other sources of information, such an inertial navigation system (INS), for estimating its own position. But the accuracy of an INS will degrade over time in absence of GPS, and uncertainties in the position of the target and missile itself will likely grow over time in absence of an IFTU. If the accumulated errors are sufficiently large, then the munition may fail to acquire and prosecute the target.
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