Naval Story
Naval Developments: 2008
By Norman Friedman in Naval under Print Edition with no comments
This is neccesarily a highly selective tour of only a few world navies. or the U.S. Navy, perhaps the most important event of 2008 came in February, when a Standard Missile 3 (SM-3) from USS Lake Erie (CG 70) destroyed a U.S. satellite tumbling toward Earth. Although the satellite was not at very high altitude, this was a stunning demonstration that a modified version of the U.S. Navy’s standard Aegis Weapon System could indeed destroy a space target. The demonstration may be particularly important in the context of the ongoing war of nerves between the United States and China over Taiwan. The Chinese increasingly see U.S. carriers as an important (perhaps the most important) barrier to their campaign to pressure the Taiwanese into accepting their sovereignty. They have made several attempts to convince the U.S. government that the carriers cannot survive in or near the Taiwan Straits. These included demonstrating that Chinese ocean 
surveillance is good enough to vector a submarine into attacking position (against the carrier Kitty Hawk – [CV 63]) and also repeated claims, taken seriously in Washington, that they are about to deploy ballistic missiles capable of hitting carriers steaming offshore. This capability has not yet been demonstrated, but for years a ballistic missile threat has been touted as an overwhelming threat to surface warships.
The SM-3 shot suggests otherwise. A cruiser working with a carrier would be in an unusually favorable position to deal with an approaching missile. Usually anti-missile weapons face crossing targets flying at extremely high speeds. In an anti-carrier attack, the target would still be flying very fast, but it would be coming almost directly toward the defending cruiser, and fire control would become far simpler. Against that, the timeline for the defense would be far shorter than if the cruiser were, say, firing at a missile flying overhead toward a distant target. Critics of current systems have argued that they should have nuclear warheads, because hit-to-kill warheads may well miss their targets. In the carrier defense role, the advantage of going non-nuclear is that there is no nuclear fireball to blind the defending system. It should not have been any surprise that the Chinese bitterly denounced the satellite shootdown as an immoral and disguised test of space warfare capability.
In 2008, the U.S. Navy received its two prototype Littoral Combat Ships (LCS), Freedom (LCS 1) and Independence (LCS 2), which may be the beginning of a new kind of fleet. They are intended to distribute the sensors that the Navy hopes will provide it with effective surveillance of a littoral area, hence with the ability to deal with threats well before they approach ships offshore…
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July 30th, 2010
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