Later versions of the Virginia class will include the Virginia Payload Module, which can accommodate 28 Tomahawk-sized missiles. If the Navy can stick an undersea version of SM-6 in those silos, each Virginia sub could suddenly have a battery of 12 Mach 3.5 anti-ship missiles on call. The Navy’s Virginia-class submarines each have twelve vertical launch system (VLS) tubes in their nose, behind the sonar array, for Tomahawk land attack missiles. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Tristan B. Each conceals a brace of six Tomahawk missiles. The Virginia-class submarine USS Colorado, with its two missile silo hatches open. The same E-2D in the scenario could instead detect a Chinese naval task force and the same destroyer launches the same missiles, only to destroy enemy ships. In 2016, the Navy sank the decommissioned frigate Reuben James (yes, that Reuben James, the star of the Tom Clancy novel Red Storm Rising) with SM-6 missiles. The Standard class of missiles has always had a secondary ability to attack ships -several were used in the late 1980s against Iranian warships during Operation Praying Mantis. In 2016, then-Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter announced that SM-6 had an anti-ship capability. This vastly increases the ability of the fleet to defend itself, particularly as anti-ship missiles grow faster over time. But a E-2D flying high enough to see them at long range could pass on targeting data to an escorting destroyer, which could launch a volley of SM-6s to shoot down the cruise missiles. Because the cruise missiles fly low to the surface and radar is a line-of-sight sensor, the fleet’s radars would have difficulty detecting them until they were very close. Under a typical engagement, a E-2D Advanced Hawkeye flying ahead of the fleet could detect a swarm of incoming anti-ship cruise missiles. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Josue Escobosa The system, known as Naval Integrated Fire Control-Counter Air or NIFC-CA, allows any of these airborne platforms to relay threat targeting data to SM-6 missiles.Ĭarrier-based F-35s could become the eyes and ears of a submarine-launched supersonic missile.
The SM-6 also has the fun trick of taking targeting data from other Navy assets, including the E-2D Advanced Hawkeye airborne early warning and control aircraft and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. In fact, it can fly at 3.5 times the speed of sound, or 2,685 miles an hour. The missile's only drawback is, originally designed to shoot down flying targets, it has a fairly small blast fragmentation warhead. SM-6 has a range somewhere around 180 miles. Navy Arleigh Burke-class destroyers and Ticonderoga-class cruisers to defend the fleet from cruise missiles, manned aircraft, unmanned aircraft, and even short-range ballistic missiles.
#Chinese dragon project series
The latest development of the Standard series of surface-to-air missiles, SM-6 is designed to be launched by U.S. What other existing Navy missiles fit the bill? Just one actually: the newish Standard Missile (SM) 6 air defense missile, or SM-6. SM-6 missile rising from a vertical launch silo on the USS John Paul Jones.
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