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A Tomahawk cruise missile hits a moving maritime target
A Tomahawk cruise missile hits a moving maritime target Jan. 27 after being launched from the USS Kidd (DDG-100) near San Nicolas Island in California.
U.S. Navy

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Hail Hydra! Return of the Sea-Launched Missile

Reviving a concept developed during the MX missile debate would improve the Navy’s long-range strike and antiship capabilities without expensive new platforms.
By Lieutenant Commander Collin R. Fox, U.S. Navy
January 2021
Proceedings
Nobody Asked Me, But . . .
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The United States Navy is outgunned and outranged by China. The manned surface force and carrier air wing cannot get close enough to China to fight without taking significant risks against increasingly potent forts, while the less vulnerable submarine force can do only so much. Manned missile platforms tend to be expensive—and, therefore, few. What is more, these platforms need to first sail, fly, or stage deep inside dangerous territory to fire, then retreat thousands of miles to reload. Conventional deterrence against China steadily erodes and the risk of miscalculation grows, as the entire joint force struggles to maintain credible combat power within this increasingly contested environment. The Navy needs a better way to distribute weapons, to arm far more platforms, and to quickly reload in forward locations.

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Lieutenant Commander Collin R. Fox, U.S. Navy

Lieutenant Commander Fox is a foreign area officer who most recently served as the Navy and Air Force section chief in the Office of Defense Cooperation, U.S. Embassy, Panama, until December 2020. He earned a master of systems analysis from the Naval Postgraduate School, where his team’s study on alternative antisubmarine weapons won the John Hopkins Applied Physics Lab Award for Excellence in Systems Analysis. He is also a graduate of the Chilean Naval War College.

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