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.
The LRASM was, itself, intended to partly replace the legacy Harpoon anti-ship missile; as of now, however, the Harpoon is still in service with the U.S. Navy, due to its wide availability and pre-existing stock. These missiles are reliable, they rely upon active-radar-honing, and utilize a sea-skimming flight path to avoid enemy radar detection. They also have a relatively low cost, at only $1.4-million per round. It is worth noting that the United States has sold hundreds of these powerful, but antiquated, anti-ship missiles to Taiwan, to facilitate its defense against a potential amphibious or naval assault perpetrated by the PRC.
The Norwegian-designed, Kongsberg Defense & Aerospace Naval Strike Missile is a niche addition to the United States’ A-ShM array; originally intended for deployment upon the U.S. Navy’s littoral combat ships, it is a smaller armament than most anti-ship missiles, with a 120kg warhead, however, it has proven its superiority as a modern, sea-skimming missile. The Naval Strike Missile has been adopted by many NATO member-states and allies, and the missile has a price-point of over $2-million.
The purpose of the new MACE A-ShM is in its name: the C & E stand for “Capacity Effector,” thus, the Pentagon is acutely aware of the significant role that anti-ship missiles will play in a war within the Indo-Pacific — and the U.S. Navy is sufficiently concerned about its shallow capacity in this arena, as well as the risk of running out of more sophisticated, expensive missiles. This is a concern that has been borne out within the Red Sea battlespace, during Operation Prosperity Guardian, which has required the U.S. Navy to utilize limited stocks of missiles that cost millions of dollars to destroy Iranian-made, Houthi-launched explosive drones which cost around $10,000. The MACE is intended to provide the U.S. Navy with an anti-ship missile specifically designed to be cheap enough for low-risk, pain-free, frequent use. In particular, due to its small size — and the resulting capability for the F/A-18E/F and the F-35A/C to carry four such missiles within its internal payload bay — the MACE missile is ideal for use in saturation attack stratagems, in which many inexpensive missiles are launched at a single target or a small group of targets, to overwhelm enemy warships’ air-defense systems.
With that in mind, and in light of the inevitability of conflict with China in the Indo-Pacific space, it is safe to conclude that the MACE A-ShM is a versatile, worthy addition to the United States’ robust anti-ship strike capabilities.
Logan Williams currently studies at the University of Connecticut. He is an International Affairs Researcher; Work Published in Newspapers, Magazines, and Journals, Such As: Geopolitics Magazine, Modern Diplomacy, Tufts University’s The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs, Democracy Paradox, Diario Las Américas, International Affairs Forum, Fair Observer, History Is Now Magazine, UNC at Chapel Hill’s American Diplomacy, The Center for Military Modernization’s Warrior Maven Magazine
