Some major powers like China and Russia might think that the United States is no longer the military superpower that it used to be, but the American military is out to disprove that.
U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Baldwin Carter recently announced that America plans to arm its warships with super-advanced weapons in an effort to restore the nation's military to its former glory and deter other countries from taking on the U.S.
"We face competitors who are challenging us in the open ocean, and we need to balance investment in those capabilities— advanced capabilities — in a way that we haven't had to do for quite a while," Carter said in a statement, as quoted by The Business Insider.
In the face of parallel efforts from China and Russia to deny the U.S. Navy access to vital areas like the South China Sea and Eastern Europe, the Pentagon chief said American warships "will be equipped with weapons and advanced capabilities to deter any aggressor."
"Any aggressor who isn't deterred will very much regret their decision to take us on," Carter said.
One such weapon is a new, more powerful version of the Tomahawk land attack missile (TLAM), which is 20 feet long and has a range of 1,000 nautical miles.
This weapon could be deployed onboard Navy ships of all types within a decade. In fact, the U.S. Navy fired a variant of this missile onto a moving target at sea in February last year as a way to test this weapon.
"This is potentially a game-changing capability for not a lot of cost. It's a 1,000 mile anti-ship cruise missile. It can be used by practically all our entire surface and submarine fleet," Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work said.
Since last year, the U.S. Navy has been undertaking a "rigorous programme of analytics and wargaming" by employing a new strategy called "distributed lethality." This means that all its ships have the capability to destroy targets accurately and notwithstanding the opponents' ability to block missiles.
