The Navy is continuing to develop the Naval Integrated Fire Control-Counter Air (NIFC-CA) program, an integrated threat detection and defense system capable of finding and destroying incoming anti-ship missiles from distances beyond the radar horizon.
Ship defenses, while increasingly layered, robust, and networked, are now quickly being reinforced by a growing range of non-kinetic assets of equal or even greater defensive value.
Vice Admiral Jon Hill said the United States would rely on the “SM-6 missile with its nascent capability to take on a hypersonic [missile],” but added that the missile is “really the nation’s only hypersonic defense capability.”