Navy Builds New Air Launched MACE Mini-Anti Ship Missile
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By Logan Williams, Warrior Editorial Fellow
The Pentagon has announced its need for a rapid prototype of a new, small air-launched, anti-surface vessel (anti-ship; A-ShM) cruise missile, capable of being launched from an F/A-18E/F “Super Hornet” or the F-35A/C Lightning fighter aircraft — respectively, the present and future backbone of the U.S. Navy’s aircraft carrier-based air-wing.
The Multi-Mission Affordable Capacity Effector (MACE) armament is intended to provide aircraft carrier air-wings with enhanced anti-ship strike capacity at stand-off distance, thereby avoiding placing pilots and their aircraft in immediate danger, due to the enhanced anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) capabilities of the Chinese People’s Liberation Navy within the Indo-Pacific.
Additionally, this missile is designed to be able to quickly enter mass-production, and to affordably procured by the U.S. Navy. Thus, this missile platform is a paragon of the principles expressed in President Biden’s ground-breaking National Defense Industrial Strategy (NDIS), which proclaims the Department of Defense’s intent to unburden the United States’ flagging defense industrial base by increasing the utilization of off-the-shelf weapons platforms to fill critical defense needs — rather than asking defense companies to commit to a risky decade-long development process for new, cutting-edge, and superfluous weapons systems.
The Pentagon has asked the industrial sector to plan for the missile to cost no more than $300,000 per round, and to be capable of producing the new munition at a rate of at least 500 rounds annually. More importantly, the U.S. Navy Air Systems command wants the MACE armament to be fully-fieldable and in mass-production by 2027, at the latest — the year by which many Western intelligence analysts expect China to invade Taiwan.
By comparison, the next-generation, long-range, Hypersonic Air-Launched Offensive, anti-surface vessel, cruise missile (HALO) presently under development by Lockheed Martin and RTX (formerly, Raytheon), is not expected to be fielded until well into the 2030s. Additionally, this missile is predicted to have a per-unit cost of over $40-million (similar to other Hypersonic Missile projects within other service branches), throughout a production run of only 300 missiles — after the Pentagon has already invested $400-million in its development of the missile platform. The primary benefit of the HALO missile platform is that it is designed to be launched from an aircraft carrier, an incredibly advantageous capability for war within the Indo-Pacific, a region in which the United States has a severe dearth of land-basing opportunities. More importantly, this missile is almost certainly a highly-sophisticated response to the People’s Republic of China (PRC)’s frequent posturing with its DF-26 “carrier killing” hypersonic ballistic missile — which many scholars have concluded is over-hyped and largely ineffectual.
The HALO missile is meant to be a compliment to the U.S. Navy’s AGM-158C Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM), which is intended to utilize advances in high-tech, autonomous targeting, during its midcourse and terminal flight phases. This missile is capable of being launched from the MK-41 Vertical Launch System (VLS) utilized aboard most U.S. Navy warships, or from the F/A-18E/F and F-35A/C aircraft variants — which can carry four such missiles, externally. The LRASM, which is a relatively new armament, costs approximately $3,000,000 per unit.
