Navy eyes new launchers on stalwart destroyers for putting hypersonics afloat
By: David B. Larter
30 June 2019
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Sailors remove an expended canister from the destroyer’s vertical launch system on board the destroyer Benfold. The Navy is eyeing swapping out launchers on its DDGs to accommodate hypersonic missiles. (U.S. Navy photo by MC3 Jason Amadi)
WASHINGTON – With bigger, faster missiles in development and bound for the fleet, the Navy’s engineers are eyeing back-fitting upgraded launchers on its stalwart
Arleigh Burke destroyers.
The head of Naval Sea Systems Command,
Vice Adm. Thomas Moore, told an audience at a conference of naval engineers that the destroyers, because of the vertical launch system and Aegis, the ships were easier to keep relevant than previous destroyers such as the Adams class and the Spruance class. Still, with the service attempting to keep the ships longer, new launcher may be in order to pace the threat from Russia and
China, which have been developing hypersonic weapons.
“Vertical launch system has been a real game-changer for us. We can shoot any number of things out of those launchers,” he said. “We’ll probably change those out and upgrade them for prompt strike weapons down the road.”
Putting
hypersonic weapons on surface ships would greatly increase the effectiveness of its strike capabilities. The current main strike weapon, the
Tomahawk Land Attack Missile, is a subsonic missile and is vulnerable to ever-more advanced Russian and Chinese air defenses.
Prompt strike, which refers to a Department of Defense-wide effort to field
hypersonic weapons to quickly strike anywhere in the world, are most likely coming first to submarines, said Thomas Callender, a retired submarine officer and analyst with the Heritage Foundation. Because subs are stealthy and can sneak in closer to land undetected more easily than a surface ship, they make the most sense.
“They’re looking at putting hypersonics on submarines first because where you can get access,” Callender said. “You can potentially then put them on surface ships as an added capability for them but the submarines would be the priority for access and the ranges you can achieve.”
The Navy is designing a new large surface combatant to replace the cruisers and ultimately the destroyers with larger missiles in mind. As a result, the ship may be fairly large, former Surface Warfare Director Rear Adm. Ron Boxall told Defense News last year.
The benefit of larger vertical launch cells is that you can pack more missiles into each cell, if you are not using the cell for the larger hypersonic missiles, Boxall said.
“We are going to need, we expect, space for longer range missiles,” he said. They are going to be bigger. So, the idea that you could make a bigger cell, even if you don’t use it for one big missile, you could use it for multiple missiles — quad-pack, eight-pack, whatever.”
The missiles that would go into a larger launcher are still very much under development.
The Navy is teamed with the Army to develop a booster for a hypersonic missile and the Army is leading a team with the Navy and Air Force to internally build a common glide body and make it producible on a larger scale.
Radar Upgrades
NAVSEA is also examining back-fitting a scaled-down version of the
Air and Missile Defense Radar, AN/SPY-6, being developed for the Flight III DDG. The scope of that project, however, remains to be determined.
“We are looking at a scaled-back version of the Air and Missile Defense Radar to back-fit the Flight Is and Flight IIs, similar to how we are looking for a version of the [Enterprise Air Search Radar] developed for [the Ford-class aircraft carriers] to back-fit on some of the old Nimitz-class,” Moore said.
“I’m not sure how many ships it is going to go on, we’re still doing the design work. It’s a fairly significant change to the structure of the ship, AMDR versus Spy.”
The purpose of the upgrade would be used to track the faster, more dynamic missiles being developed by Russia and China.
The array is a smaller version of the SPY-6 intended for the Flight III DDG, the first of which is now under construction at Huntington Ingalls Industries. The SPY-6 destined for DDG-125 will have 37 of what are known as radar modular assemblies, or RMA, which are 2-foot-by-2-foot-by-2-foot boxes that use gallium nitride technology to direct radar energy on air targets. The Flight IIA version will have 24 RMAs in the array.
A version of the radar planned for the FFG(X) future frigate is a nine-RMA configuration.
The Navy is aiming to upgrade all of its DDGs to Aegis Baseline 9 or higher with a ballistic missile defense capability and extend the service lives to 45 years as part of an effort to grow the fleet.
But the Navy is going to try to get 50 years out of its Flight IIA ships. The IIAs make up the bulk of the DDG fleet, with 46 total planned for the service — DDG-79 through DDG-124. DDG-127 will also be a Flight IIA.
That upgraded SPY-6 will be far easier to maintain than the current SPY-1D. Raytheon claims the radar can be maintained by simply removing an RMA and switching it out with a new one, with the rest of the work performed off-site.
The Navy is eyeing a major upgrade to its Arleigh Burke-class destroyers to accommodate hypersonic missiles.
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