Anytime I read about anti-ship missiles for the US Navy, I get interested. Lets face it, nobody should be surprised when a new idea for the 25 year old Harpoon gets canceled, the Boeing missile is a great weapon against a previous generation of ships defense systems, but it is not the way ahead in the future.

 

Bill Sweetman is reporting Raytheon is going to introduce another previous generation anti-ship missile upgrade and sell it as the future. Hmm...

At the U.S. Navy League exhibition in Washington this month, Raytheon Missile Systems will unveil an upgrade to the BGM/UGM-109E Tomahawk Block IV land-attack cruise missile that will make it a multirole weapon capable of hitting moving ships. The package has four elements: An active electronically scanned array, millimeter-wave seeker provides target acquisition and homing; a passive electronic surveillance system is for long-range acquisition and identification; the 1,000-lb. blast-fragmentation warhead is replaced by a shaped charge; and the two-way data link gets more bandwidth.

 

The missile is designed to kill or disable large, hardened warships in difficult environments such as littoral waters, over a greater range than Boeing’s Harpoon/Standoff Land Attack Missile (SLAM), the U.S. Navy’s standard antiship missile. The Raytheon warhead is twice as large as SLAM’s, and the 900-naut.-mi. range is six times greater. This is not an antipirate weapon, and it is not hard to guess which navy is the most likely target.

Sounds great, but I'm not impressed. While I like the idea of a 1000lb warhead on a ship launched anti-ship missile, lets think about this. The Tomahawk is outstanding against undefended targets, but is it really a weapon that can penetrate the defensive network of an enemy combatant force? Neither the Harpoon nor the Tomahawk have any terminal speed or maneuverability, so what exactly makes these missiles a viable option or long term solution to the anti-ship missile gap?

 

The lack of anti-ship missiles on the surface fleet, and honestly an effective anti-ship missile for our sub fleet as well, is a major warfighting gap that continues to be proven in analysis. How much longer will this be ignored? Will this even be a consideration in the QDR? It is bad enough the Navy spends half a billion dollars to build a ship, the LCS, that relies almost completely on a single helicopter for over the horizon firepower. It is even worse when one considers how much our large warships rely on aircraft to attack other ships with a weapon other than guns. An AEGIS ship is limited only by quantity in defeating the air force of most nations, but the best weapon these ships bring to the fight against other naval vessels is either a helicopter, or a 5" gun?

 

Oh that's right, the SM-2 can handle it. Nothing like a relatively tiny warhead to stop a warship. How many SM-2s would it take to sink a 5000 ton warship? I'm betting the answer is more than 10 direct hits.

 

Bill Sweetman's article covers a number of anti-ship missile options that will be on display, but I have to say it is pretty sad in my opinion that US contractors have not evolved their anti-ship missile options beyond the Tomahawk or Harpoon. Is a VLS launched 200nm range anti-ship missile with effective terminal capabilities really too much to ask for in the 21st century? I'm not looking for a ramjet missile, but it would be nice if we were talking about a missile that was designed after the Carter administration.

 

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Like I said, not everyone is overjoyed at the thought of an anti-ship Tomahawk.

 

We know that part of the reason for the withdrawal of the RGM-109B TASM circa 1995 (in addition to the general post Cold War drawdown) was related to (1) lack of positive target identification (the passive identification/direction finding (PI/DF) system in TASM lacked any IFF capability) and (2) the limitations of combining a very long range (250 nm) with subsonic speed (approx 475 knots) (meaning a target could move quite a distance in the time it took the missile to arrive).

 

On top of those limitations, we know - even from HCE and ANW experience - that sending a fairly large, expensive subsonic missile against a well defended warship (bristling with area and point defense SAMs, as well as CIWS) is liable to a recipe for a frustrated ASuW strike mission.

 

What improvements, then, would an anti-ship variant of the Block IV Tactical Tomahawk offer?

 

The new seeker sounds promising, especially with regard to target imaging capability (ID and aimpoint selection) and jamming resistance. The updated ESM package helps with identification. A shaped charge is generally better than blast-frag for wrecking warships from the inside out (though most any ships are going to suffer immensely from 1,000 lb of warhead, regardless of type). Two-way datalink and loitering capability are obviously useful. As is the 900 nautical miles of reach (albeit at the same or similar subsonic speed), particularly if you're hoping to stay outside the range of coastal defences. Additionally, Block IV is generally rated as stealthier than the Block I/II Tomahawks.

 

So is it enough?

 

Particularly in light of increasingly complex, effective and (most importantly) proliferating surveillance radars, EO/IR systems, SAMs (both long range and short, e.g. Aster, Mica VL, etc), and guns (35mm AHEAD, 76mm DART, etc)?

 

Or considering that this proposal is a wholly new Tactom variant, and for every ASuW Tactom loaded into the VLS cells, you have to remove one land attack Tactom, an SM-2/-3 or 4x ESSM? Is it worth it? (I note that as part of the original Block IV upgrade, there was a plan to develop a single all purpose missile, the RGM-109E TMMM (Tomahawk Multi-Mode Missile) for use against both ships and land targets, which would have used an imaging seeker (either a FLIR or the millimeter wave radar). But this proposal doesn't appear to go that route).

 

Many wonder (Brains and Galrahn included, perhaps) why the USN hasn't been able to produce a supersonic antiship cruise missile. Particularly when we consider that some others have been doing it for decades now, and seem to be perfecting the concept with weapons like SS-N-22 Sunburn, AS-17 Krypton (Kh-31), SS-N-26 Sapless, SS-N-27 Sizzler, and BrahMos.

 

Target/missile simulator programs like the GQM-163 Coyote and GQM-173 MSST show promising research in closely related fields, so why hasn't it translated into a new and effective anti-ship weapon? I have my own suspicions, none of which are related to any inability on the part of American engineers to actually produce a capable weapon.

 

 

Surely some of you loved or hated the TASM enough to make a comment on this latest proposal. Anyone?