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On Tuesday, October 4, North Korea fired a ballistic missile over Japan, in what appeared to be a deliberate escalation to get the attention of Tokyo and Washington. The missile travelled 4,500km (2,800 miles) before falling into the Pacific Ocean – far enough to hit the US island of Guam if it took another trajectory. It is the North’s first missile launch over Japan since 2017. Japan issued an alert to some citizens to take cover. The US, Japan and South Korea conducted their own military drills in response.
On Wednesday, October 5, Congress put out a new report on hypersonic missile defense. Hypersonic weapons, like ballistic missiles, fly at speeds of at least Mach 5, or roughly 1 mile per second. Unlike ballistic missiles, hypersonic weapons do not follow a ballistic trajectory and can maneuver en route to their target. Russia has reportedly fielded its first hypersonic weapons in December 2019, while some experts believe that China fielded hypersonic weapons as early as 2020. The United States is not expected to field hypersonic weapons before 2023.
On Thursday, October 6, The U.S. Army had a vision to field a new ground system by the end of the decade that will use artificial intelligence and machine learning to help automate processes and cut the time it takes to identify a far-off threat and decide how best to engage it. For now, soldiers must use spreadsheets, sticky notes and manually toggle between systems to aggregate targeting data. And while soldiers perform that task well, such cumbersome operations become much harder when multiple targets are encountered on a battlefield, according to Courtney Coulter, chief of the decision science branch at Army Combat Capabilities Development Command’s C5ISR Center.
On Monday, October 10, the pressure for the United States to send Ukraine more advanced air defense systems reached a new high after Russia escalated its war on the country with a barrage of deadly missile strikes. The Kremlin attacks, which targeted civilian areas that for months had enjoyed a relative calm, brought back the argument that the West must send Ukraine more high-tech air defense weapons, including those similar to Israel’s Iron Dome missile interception system. Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a rain of cruise and ballistic missiles on Kyiv and nine other Ukrainian cities, killing at least 11 individuals and injuring at least another 64.
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