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The era of “great power” competition with China and Russia — characterized in part by advances in long-range missile arsenals — is bringing ever more military innovation to Hawaii as the United States seeks to keep its technological advantage in rapidly changing times.
Evidence of that can be seen in recent weeks alone, including:
>> A 132-foot robot warship — the Sea Hunter — became the first ship to successfully navigate autonomously from San Diego to Pearl Harbor and back to San Diego without a single crew member aboard, except for short-duration systems-check boardings, maker Leidos said Jan. 31.
Sea Hunter, envisioned to be part of what someday could be a 50-ship anti-submarine warfare robot picket force, had arrived in Hawaii on
Oct. 31 for the first time.
>> A trio of Air Force batwing B-2 bombers and more than 200 airmen Jan. 10-31 deployed to Hawaii from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri — the second such deployment since an August-September rotation — to practice operating out of a variety of locations to make their movement less predictable for would-be enemies.
The bombers flew 37 sorties for a total of 171 hours in local and long-distance missions that included refueling on Guam. Ground crews practiced loading 500-pound BDU-50 training bombs into the aircraft.
The stealth bombers also flew with the equally stealthy Hawaii Air National Guard F-22 Raptor fighters. Both platforms would be called upon to lead the opening air campaign in the event of war with China.
>> The Navy’s new SPY-6 radar Jan. 31 successfully tracked a short-range ballistic missile target launched from the Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kauai in its final development test and on its way to vastly improving the surrounding threat picture for Navy ships.
SPY-6 can see a target half the size at twice the distance of the SPY-1D radar in use on Navy ships today, according to the manufacturer, Raytheon. “The radar significantly enhances the ships’ ability to detect air and surface targets as well as the ever-proliferating ballistic missile threats,” the company said.
The radar will simultaneously support long-range tracking and discrimination of ballistic missiles outside Earth’s atmosphere as well as self-defense against air and surface threats, the Navy said.
“Hawaii is a critical training and testing area for the Navy, and its strategic location places it center stage in the Pacific,” said Cmdr. Nate Christensen, deputy spokesman for U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. “The harbors and bases the Navy uses here are among the very best in the world. World-class facilities like the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard and Pacific Missile Range Facility enable technological innovation and help ensure that U.S. Pacific Fleet naval forces are trained and ready to respond to any potential contingency.”
PMRF is the world’s largest testing, training and research/development facility. Hawaii also is on the leading edge geographically of the United States’ focus on the Indo-Pacific.
The National Defense Strategy, released in January 2018, continues to set the stage for the innovation that will be a hallmark of future military operations in Hawaii.
The study says the United States emerged from a “period of strategic atrophy” during the Iraq and Afghanistan insurgency wars “aware that our competitive military advantage has been eroding.”
An increasingly complex security environment characterized by China as a strategic competitor and Russia as a revisionist power is also defined as one of rapid technological change.
“In this environment, there can be no complacency — we must make difficult choices and prioritize what is most important to field a lethal, resilient and rapidly adapting joint force,” the strategy states.
That includes a mandate for all of the military branches to field an increasing array of long-range weapons to counter missile advances made particularly by China.
Several important tests were held during the Navy’s Rim of the Pacific exercises off Hawaii last summer.
The Army fired a Naval Strike Missile from a shore-based truck, hitting a decommissioned Navy ship
63 miles out at sea, while Japan fired four truck-mounted missiles to also hit the ship.
The Navy test-fired a series of new hypervelocity projectiles from the destroyer USS Dewey that the Congressional Research
Service said could be a “game changer” for defending warships against Chinese missiles.
Microspoilers and GPS input would be used to guide the projectiles against low-flying cruise missiles and drones.
The Pearl Harbor submarine USS Olympia, meanwhile, became the first sub to fire a long-range ship-killer Harpoon missile since 1997. With a focus on shorter-range torpedoes and land-attack cruise missiles, the undersea service had done away with the anti-ship missile capability.
The Harpoon went into cruise mode and impacted the ex-tank landing ship Racine as planned.
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