Pentagon Readies New Ship-Killers for Pacific Showdown

[unhappycamper]

Pentagon Readies New Ship-Killers for Pacific Showdown
By David Axe
November 11, 2010

Pentagon planners were wary of China’s double-digit military-budget growth rates even before the global economic crisis put the squeeze on America’s own defense investment. Now the Chinese army’s growth continues while America’s flat-lines. That’s got the U.S. military, especially the Navy, scrambling for new ideas.

The most hopeful is an emerging concept for mixing U.S. Navy ships and subs with Air Force planes to form a tightly-knit, super-lethal, ship-killing force meant to counter an increasingly powerful Chinese fleet. The Pentagon calls it “AirSea Battle,” an homage to NATO’s Cold War “AirLand Battle” concept that pioneered tactics for taking out thousands of Soviet tanks with smart weapons. U.S. Secretary of Defense Bob Gates called the classified AirSea Battle concept “encouraging.”

It seems AirSea Battle mostly involves better communications and command procedures for integrating ships and planes into the same task forces. But there’s at least one new piece of hardware: a new, more deadly anti-ship missile. On Wednesday, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency awarded Lockheed Martin a 3-year, $160 million contract to develop the Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile. The goal is for LRASM to give Navy ships “the ability to attack important enemy ships outside the ranges of the enemy’s ability to respond with anti-ship missiles of their own.”

LRASM must fit into the Navy’s existing vertical-launch cells and should rely less on “off-board” targeting — drones, planes, satellites — than current weapons. In other words, the LRASM must have its own, smart sensors. That would allow even isolated or electronically-jammed American ships to sink enemy vessels.

Darpa’s interest in ship-killing missiles represent a major sea change — or a blast from the past. Time was, 20 years ago, the Navy had a bigger arsenal of anti-ship missiles, ranging from the tiny Penguin to the mid-size Harpoon and the huge, long-range Tomahawk. Today the Tomahawk is used strictly for land-attack and only a few ships carry Harpoons.

[leveymg]

1. Tora! Tora! Tora!

Awesome photo. That image is like an inverted universe version of "The Final Countdown." Ever see that film, where the USS Nimitz gets sucked into a time warp and sent back to the Pacific on December 6, 1941? Do they change history? Was that F-14 really able to turn with a Zero?

One of the questions posed in the movie's dialogue was, do we give Franklin Delano Roosevelt nuclear weapons? Odd film, but interesting.

[avebury]

2. Maybe the Chinese learned from the US

Part of the reason that the USSR collapsed is because they could not keep pace financially with the US military spending. Maybe the Chinese will do the same with the US. In the name of maintaining our military superiority, the US might be dumb enough to keep spending us into a hole.

[SammyWinstonJack]

3. Plenty of $$$ for war toys and none for what really matters.

:puke:

[Kaleva]

4. Every surface combatant carries Harpoons

"...and only a few ships carry Harpoons."

Every OHP, Tico, and Burke carries the Harpoon.

[theophilus]

5. Keeping us SAFE.....while we live in our cardboard boxes under the bridge and

the really affluent live in a van down by the river. We're number one!!!!!!!!!!

[Gravel Democrat]

6. ^^