The U.S. Navy has a ship-killing problem. The service has, over the past 25 years, neglected the basic mission to sink and destroy enemy ships. Now, with the Russian and Chinese navies on the horizon, the Navy is looking at ways of making its ships more lethal—by repurposing missiles as ship-killers.

The problem started with the end of the Cold War. Defense budget cuts in the 1990s slashed the size of the navy, and pushed back a replacement for the venerable Harpoon missile. This was understandable—with the demise of the Soviet Navy, the U.S. Navy had no peer in projecting sea power.

9/11 further shifted priorities. After the attacks in New York and Washington D.C. the service shifted towards support of land operations, particularly in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Horn of Africa. Not much need for an anti-ship missile there, either.

In the meantime, the rest of the world has not stood still. The Russian Navy is crawling back from starvation budgets of the last twenty years. Russia is an enthusiastic user of naval forces, sending them wherever Russian interests lie, in places like Iran, Syria, and Venezuela.

The biggest concern is China, which has made modernizing air and naval forces the number one defense priority. The People's Liberation Army Navy now totals more than 300 ships of all types, and China's shipyards are continously cranking out new aircraft carriers, destroyers, frigates, corvettes, submarines, and amphibious vessels.

The U.S. Navy is now, belatedly, studying ways to spread anti-ship firepower across the fleet. One answer is to give existing missiles the ability to attack surface vessels—the SM-6 air defense missile , now entering the fleet, is gaining the ability to engage ships.

The SM-6 is the latest iteration of the venerable Standard air defense missile that has armed Navy ships for decades. SM-6 is capable of engaging aircraft, ballistic missile, and even cruise missiles, and is even capable of being provided targeting information by E-2D Hawkeyes under the Navy's combat networking system.

Almost all U.S. Navy combat ships will carry the SM-6. SM-6 fits in vertical launch silos on all destroyers and cruisers, and most of these ships have a hundred or more silos. The older Harpoon system had to be carried externally in canister launchers, limiting the number of missiles that could carried.

The SM-6's biggest drawback as a ship-killer? It doesn't have a very large warhead, making it more of a ship-damager. In the 1980s, the U.S. Navy struck a small Iranian patrol boat with five SM-1 missiles , an earlier version of the SM-6, and still failed to sink it.

The SM-6 as an anti-ship missile is not a one-missile solution to Navy's anti-ship problem. A larger, purpose-built missile carried in large numbers is still under development. One alternative a new anti-ship version of the Tomahawk cruise missile; another, the Long-Range Ant-Ship Missile, is a derivative of the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile (JASSM).

For now, though, there's only one active U.S. Navy ship that actually sank another vessel:the 218-year-old U.S.S. Constitution.

Via USNI News

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