Taiwan upgrading Patriot systems

Raytheon announced it has received a $27 million dollar contract to support and upgrade Taiwan’s Patriot missile defense systems. Raytheon said it will provide engineers and other technical equipment to the island.

Sanjay Kapoor, vice president of Patriot programs at Raytheon Integrated Defense Systems, “We’re very pleased that the upgrades are happening on an accelerated timeline. This will provide Taiwan with an enhanced level of security sooner than expected” and that “Upgrades ensure that Taiwan’s Patriots are fully capable of detecting, classifying and engaging all known and future hostile threats including aircraft, ballistic and cruise missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles.”

Japan bolstering missile defense capabilities

The Japanese Defense Ministry said it is looking for 176.1B yen in this years budget to bolster its missile defense budget.  It is planning to use at least some of this money to purchase American Patriot Advanced Capability -3 systems. The PAC-3 system is the lower tier of the Japanese missile defense shield. The upper tier is comprised of the Aegis based Standard Missile-3.

More on Japanese missile defense later…

Nuclear weapons across the world

National missile defense isn’t going to stop China. You can see in Han Kristensen’s breakdown of last month’s Air Force Intelligence Report that China, even though they don’t have multiple warheads on their missiles now, they certainly have plenty of them. Maybe not a lot compared to the United States or Russia, but more than we will have ground based interceptors – by a lot. The threat, as Gen. O’Reilly has stated repeatedly, is Iran, North Korea or some non-state actor or rogue nation.

About China Kristensen writes

The report echoes recent statements from other branches of the U.S. intelligence community that the number of warheads on Chinese ICBM capable of reaching the United States could expand to “well over 100 in the next 15 years.” Unfortunately, “well over 100” can mean anything so it is hard to compare this NASIC’s projection with the CIA projection from 2001 of 75-100 warheads “primarily targeted against the United States” by 2015. That projection only included DF-5A and DF-31A capable of targeting all of the United States, with the high number requiring multiple warheads on DF-5A. But the timeline for the anticipated increase has slipped considerably from 2015 to 2024.

Maybe more interesting was this tidbit:

Curiously, even after two nuclear tests and the intelligence community stating for more than a decade that North Korea has nuclear weapons, the NASIC report does not list any of North Korea’s weapons as “nuclear” or “conventional or nuclear.” That is, I think, interesting.

Hmm…

JSanderson