I for my part particularly enjoyed everything related to missiles (even though there were some canards in that category – like that story about the ‘new north-korean two-staged missile’, which eventually turned out to be in fact a south-korean rocket-boosted anti-submarine-torpedo…), and your posts on the ‘How of Proliferation’ were excellent work.

Good luck with your new job – and keep watching the skies!

P.S.: BTW, i’m not really surprised by what you write about ‘unpleasant’ reactions on comments considering NASA’s manned space flight program or UFOs. Those two topics seem to be highly attractive to people with fanatical commitment, and fanatics typically will try to forcefully suppress anything openly undermining their (illogical) beliefs.
Thankfully, blogging is rather unphysical – so any sort of aggressive behaviour will in most cases be limited to written form…

Putting that as the inner layer in a layered defense (under the SM-2′s and 3′s) might reduce the effectiveness of the system to a point where it wouldn’t justify the risk inherent in the attack itself.

Make sense?

Since the more AEGIS Ships you have in one group the better and more accurate is your tracking and terminal guidance of the interceptor. Means one AEGIS Ships barely has a chance against a sophisticated Anti-Ship missile (Sizzler, Brahmos, DF-21D, maybe even against an exocet or harpoon) But you can track and illumintate the target more accurate especially a High-G maneuvering missile in terminal flight if you use x>1 AEGIS ship, above that cooperative engagement capability gives you greater range to detect the target (battlespace awareness).

Some of you pointed out the number of cells a Tico has. That does not matter in a battle-group! AEGIS selects the right weapon from the right ship in the best shooting position automatically if incoming is detected. (remember Iranian Flight shot down by SM-2 (or 1?))

compared to the russian AD Systems the US relies on layered defense. from outer to inner: SM-3, SM-6 (Im a fan of this one already), SM-2 RIM-66M Block IIIB, ESSM, SeaRAM, CIWS. On land based you can put THAAD between SM-6 and SM-2 Block IIIB and PAC-3 somewhere around ESSM and PAC-2 (by trend Anti Aircraft) somewhere around RIM-66M.

As for the vast number of incoming Anti Ship missile keep in mind that the ESSM (an extremely sophisticated interceptor, used as the primary interceptor by many american-buying navies around the world and that means something) can be quadpacked into the MK41. Given the fact that a DDG-100 (i.e.) has just 10 cells for ESSM makes 40 missiles you can fire at an incoming now add the cooperative engagement capability.

I at this point highly doubt that a Carrier Strike Group with 2 Ticos and 3 Burkes maybe even a SanAntonio armed with seaRam and the carrier itself is an easy target for a DF-21D.

almost forgot: the E-2C and soon the E-2D with AESA can be integrated into the cooperative engagement capability.

This makes our carriers the best defended airfields in the world! And those are facts and not paper tigers!

BTW: since I am a fan the SM-6 is close to IOC. And do not forget the SM-2 RIM-66M Block IIIB has a IR seeker and a maneuvering upgrade (I assume it to be thrust vectoring correct me if you have better information here)

thanks for reading.

Surely such defensive equipment is still designed into our fleet?

Wouldn’t surrounding a ship with a shower of spray prevent an IR sensor from detecting that ship now surrounded by a cooling shower of sea water that started at the same temperature as the surrounding sea, but which is now cooler by evaporation?

I imagine it might even affect radar, I know rain has a effect on weather radar and satellite communications.

Burnout velocity for a 2,000-km system is about 2km/s (using gross rule of thumb: 1km/s vel for each 1,000km of range). So before it hits thick atmosphere on descent — say, 50km altitude — it’s going to be moving that quickly in a ballistic trajectory. You either need to dwell on the target during the long exoatmospheric descent from apogee to reentry, and deal with shooting through 100km of atmosphere as well as the inverse-square law robbing you of your power, or you need to wait until it’s reentering, which introduces a whole other raft of challenges.

Once it reenters, even if it’s unguided, the deceleration is going to make it bloody difficult to keep a beam tracking on the RV. The axial acceleration curve is going to spike somewhere well north of 30 Gs (maybe even 100 Gs?), and it’s not going to be a constant acceleration either. Now add the hypothetical terminal guidance, and realize that the RV is probably trying to induce lateral acceleration as well. All of this is happening in the Mach 7 – Mach 3 regime… it’s a tracking nightmare, and you’re talking about trying to bulls-eye the guidance system. You might have better luck aiming for the center of mass and overloading the thermal protection system; it’s designed to survive reentry, but if you can add more heat than it can slough off, perhaps you can cook a hole in the shielding and let atmospheric friction do the work.

If there is terminal guidance, even if the guidance system is getting good data, the control system will not be able to recover from having a hole burned into the RV. That’s where I’d put my terawatt laser if I had one.

The outermost layer is the only one that’s ever been properly tested, though. There’s only one example in history of a real escort hitting a real missile with an anti-missile missile, and no examples of a close-in weapon system working in combat.

Two commments….

1 – What about a space based launch platform like the old Russian Polyus which failed on launch? It seems to me like a space based launch platform would greatly reduce the complications that have been described.

I know that there are a lot of treaty issues with weaponizing space, but it would seem to me that they could deploy a small number of some sattelites that appear to have other purposes but are actually carrier killers and no one would know until they attacked.

2 – @Dan,

Exocets aren’t the threat to our carriers that you think. You must first get an aircraft close enough to launch one (not easy.) Then your pilot must target the correct ship (not as easy as you might think.) Carriers don’t sail by themselves, they run with a pretty stiff escort to protect them. They have their own Phalanx systems along with the Phalanx systems of their escorts. Even IF an Exocet gets through, it would do some damage but it would take a BUNCH to take out a carrier. These aren’t the smaller, aluminum hull vessels that were roasted in the Falklands.