A few days ago, the US Navy announced a record order of $1 billion to acquire prowling ammunition, sometimes improperly called kamikaze drones, as part of a program marked with the seal of secrecy. For the US Navy, it is a question of acquiring long-range means capable of responding to developments in the field of access denial, with increasingly efficient anti-aircraft and anti-ship batteries, mobile and discreet, making air and naval strikes much more difficult and risky.
Obviously, the same causes lead to the same consequences. Indeed, it is now the turn of the US Marines Corps to announce its intention to implement a vast fleet of wandering ammunition likely to evolve into a swarm as part of its Force Design 2030 reorganization, aimed at adapting its structure and its doctrine to modern distributed engagements, in particular in the Pacific theater which, today, concentrates all the attention of its General Staff.
More precisely, in advance of the Joint-All Domain Command and Control doctrine which represents the pillar of the current evolution within the American armies, the US Marines Corps now relies on Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations (EABO), a projected capacity with all access denial and keystroke means to control a maritime, air and land space, while having a sufficiently light structure to maintain a certain mobility.
Be that as it may, in addition to the anti-aircraft, anti-missile, anti-ship and artillery systems at medium and long range, as well as the air capabilities provided by the F-35B combat aircraft with vertical take-off and landing or short and the Osprey, King Stallion, Viper and Venom helicopters, the Corps now wants to equip itself with long-range vagrant ammunition systems, designed to evolve in a swarm, in order to reinforce or even supplement the capacities of its artillery and its aviation.
The ammunition currently being tested by the USMC can hit targets at 100 km, with the aim of increasing this range to several hundred kilometers in the years to come. Above all, the Corps wants to equip itself with ammunition that is economical and quick to produce, and relatively simple to implement, so that it can effectively increase its firepower significantly on a tight schedule, without harming other equipment programs on an already strained budget.
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