WASHINGTON — Addressing a perceived increase in cruise missile threats, the U.S. Army is working to develop new defenses against the weapons by fiscal 2008, an official said Thursday (see GSN, Feb. 26).

At least one of three key components, though, may not be ready for fielding until two years after that goal, the official also said in March congressional testimony. In that hearing, Lt. Gen. Larry Dodgen, commander of the Army Space and Missile Defense Command, told Congress that cruise missile defense efforts needed to be accelerated.

Existing Army defenses against cruise missiles consist primarily of the Patriot antiballistic missile systems, which did not shoot down a small number of Iraqi cruise missiles apparently fired at U.S. forces last year during the war.

There is an inherent difficulty in using ballistic missile defenses for lower-altitude, slower-flying cruise missile defense, Dodgen said last week at an event sponsored by the National Defense University Foundation.

“It makes it extremely difficult for the systems that we use to combat ballistic missiles to also position themselves for cruise missiles,” he said, adding that expanding the role of the interceptors can complicate the challenge of identifying airborne objects in combat.

Another challenge, he said, is tracking cruise missiles at greater distances, which experts say is difficult because the weapons fly lower and slower than ballistic missiles and are better concealed by the horizon from ground-based radar.

The Army plans to build a cruise missile defense system with three principal components: a new airborne sensor called JLENS, to help track more distant and low-flying threats; a modified seeker guided-missile called SLAMRAAM; and an “integrated fire control” system for integrating the radar data from other sensors, including from those other services, to add greater surveillance range.

JLENS, or Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensors, is a dirigible holding fire control and surveillance radars (see GSN, Oct. 6, 2003). SLAMRAAM stands for Surface-Launched Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missile. It will be a version of a missile already used by Air Force and Navy aircraft.

Regarding the integrated fire control, Dodgen said last week the military has already shown it can use radar data gathered from an airborne platform to fire a missile when the missile system’s own radar cannot see the target coming.

“We can shoot a missile, and we can use radar data from some other sensor that is not organic to the engineered system that we have,” he said.

Dodgen in March testimony said the SLAMRAAM could be ready by fiscal 2008, but the JLENS not until fiscal 2010.

“It is clear that the required systems and capabilities necessary to counter this emerging threat need to be accelerated to field a cruise missile defense as soon as possible,” he said in prepared testimony to the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Strategic Forces.

Dodgen last week said the envisioned new cruise missile defense capability was intended to address advanced cruise missile threats the United States might someday face from a major or smaller power.

For the near term the Army has taken measures, which Dodgen did not specify, following the Iraq cruise missile attacks to shore up its defenses.