Just a few days ago, the US Navy announced a record $1 billion order to acquire lurking munitions , sometimes incorrectly called kamikaze drones, as part of a program marked with secrecy. For the American Navy, this involves equipping itself with 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 Marine Corps to announce its intention to implement a vast fleet of wandering munitions capable of evolving in swarms as part of its Force Design 2030 reorganization, aimed at adapting its structure and its doctrine to modern distributed commitments, in particular in the Pacific theater which, today, concentrates all the attentions of its General Staff.
More precisely, in advance of the Joint-All Domain Command and Control doctrine which represents the pillar of the ongoing evolution within the American armies, the US Marines Corps now relies on Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations (EABO), a projected capacity having all the means of denial of access and strike to control a maritime, air and land space, while having a sufficiently light structure to maintain certain mobility.
Regardless, in addition to medium- and long-range anti-aircraft, anti-missile, anti-ship, and artillery systems, as well as aerial capabilities provided by vertical takeoff and landing F-35B fighter jets or short and the Osprey, King Stallion, Viper and Venom helicopters, the Corps now wants to equip itself with long-range loitering munitions systems , designed to evolve in swarms, in order to reinforce or even supplement the capabilities of its artillery and its aviation.
The munitions currently being tested by the USMC can hit targets at 100 km, with the aim of bringing this range to several hundred kilometers in the years to come. Above all, the Corps wants to equip itself with munitions that are economical and quick to produce, and relatively simple to implement, so as to be able to significantly increase its firepower on a tight schedule, without harming other equipment programs on a budget already under pressure.
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