In February, the destroyer USS Kidd (DDG-100) fired a Tomahawk cruise missile that hit a moving target ship. That might not seem terribly significant, except that the missile had no seeker, and the ship was being tracked by an F/A-18 that had no direct link to the missile. What might otherwise be a routine test was actually revolutionary, the latest development in an evolving networked capability. It was part of what the Surface Navy Association called “distributed lethality” at its January meeting, and it parallels the new Naval Integrated Fire Control-Counter-Air (NIFC-CA) that is now entering service. Both are attempts to maximize the net effectiveness of a combination of ships and aircraft. That is not a new idea, but the current applications go well beyond what was possible in the past.
The Tomahawk followed commands sent via Link 16, which directed it to a series of positions and ultimately into the target ship. No one would deny that a short-range seeker would improve the missile’s hitting capacity against an evasive target, but the test shows that the large number of land-attack Tomahawks currently in the Navy inventory are also potent antiship weapons. What is striking is that an enormous change in U.S. Navy capability, from no long-range antiship capacity (other than from aircraft) before the test, has been transformed into a very considerable capacity. The F/A-18 that tracked the target ship could have tracked several vessels simultaneously. It certainly had the ability to transmit more than one ship track. For that matter, ship tracks could also have been generated and transmitted by an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), or by a combination of different sources.
The combination of disparate sources is the most interesting possibility. After all, the commander who dispatched the missile did so on the basis of a tactical picture to which the F/A-18 contributed. Other aircraft and systems could also have contributed, particularly in a wartime situation in which the target was defended. That has enormous tactical significance. In most warfare, the first warning of an impending attack is enemy reconnaissance dedicated to the particular target about to be hit. If a target and its track are revealed by ongoing routine reconnaissance, the first warning of an attack is the missile popping over the horizon.
This is not as new as it may seem. During the Cold War the Soviets maintained an ocean-surveillance system that was always trying to track major missile targets such as aircraft carriers. The U.S. response was a surveillance system that picked up signals from Soviet ships and created tracks by linking the positions indicated at different times. In each case surveillance depended heavily on emissions from the target ship, and there was a real fear that a target might be operating near other ships. That is, the incoming missile or salvo might be soaked up by non-targets, such as lower-priority ships within a formation. The Soviets took this possibility so seriously that they sometimes assigned surface ships (“tattletales”) to report where the high-priority targets were within a formation. After the Cold War ended, it turned out that at least some Soviet naval bomber units included special reconnaissance aircraft assigned to fly into carrier formations for the same purpose. They practiced this role, which probably explains low-level passes over U.S. carriers, including one that caused the Soviet bomber to crash.
A combination of trackers, at least some of them capable of identifying the target, would solve the problem and also avoid alerting the victim. Distributed lethality is part of a much larger movement toward a style of warfare in which every ship and aircraft contributes both to the Fleet’s picture of what is happening and also to its ability to fight. There are two keys, both within reach. One is that every ship and aircraft has to know where it is. Otherwise its reports may confuse rather than clarify. In combat-system terms this is the gridlock issue, and it bedevils computerized combat systems. There are various solutions in which computers keep comparing pictures until they match up. The simpler solution is the Global Positioning Satellite system, but it could become a wartime target.
The other key is the data links that tell the weapons where to go (and which also carry back reconnaissance information). For distributed lethality to work, virtually all air and antiship weapons have to be able to receive commands, because most of the time the firing ship or aircraft will not be the guiding one. Guidance will be a function of the fleet command, which has the overall tactical picture. That picture should be duplicated on board other ships and even aircraft, so that the fleet as a whole is not crippled by the loss of any of its ships. The issue is how many weapons can be handled simultaneously on one network. At one time Tomahawk was advertised as a successful application of Link 16, then it seemed that Link 16 nets were not sufficiently capacious. Now the problem appears to have been overcome.
Pictures are generally imprecise, so most weapons will need terminal seekers. The better the picture, the smaller the investment in such seekers. In the case of the Kidd’s target ship, no seeker was needed. The higher the speed of the target, the more frequent command updates would have to be, and at some point the system would break down. That point would determine how good the seeker on the missile would have to be. The faster the missile, incidentally, the less important constant updates would be. The projected new hypersonic antiship missile would need fewer updates than a subsonic Tomahawk. The picture concept would make it easier to use a single missile to strike both land and sea targets, its antiship seeker turned off for land attack (there may be important differences in what sort of warhead is needed, however).
In each case the idea is the same. An individual ship or aircraft has finite capabilities, both in sensing and in attacking. How can we make the most of them? Handling each aircraft and each ship as a separate entity that must detect and engage a target limits the number of targets a fleet can fight. It does not make the best use of the overall capacities the fleet has. For example, an F-35 is a fighter-bomber with an unusually sophisticated electronic surveillance system. In theory, the point of the system was to enable the F-35 to detect and bypass enemy air defenses by forming a comprehensive picture of what it faced (the system is also well adapted to jamming those defenses). However, an F-35 in a combat air patrol would be well placed to detect the radars of incoming attackers. It might be able to fire several long-range missiles at them and also jam their attack radars. In that case its contribution to fleet air defense would be limited by factors such as its ability to close with the attackers before they released their own missiles.
The fleet has other aircraft and also missile-firing ships. Some of them cannot engage the incoming enemy because it is below their horizon at maximum missile range. The current CEC system was conceived as a way of overcoming such limitations by merging the air pictures created by several Aegis ships. The current NIFC-CA idea extends that concept. We can think of the F-35 mainly as a source of information about what is coming. The fleet’s air-defense system can use its information to clarify the picture of the quickly evolving air situation. In that case the electronic surveillance system on board the F-35 becomes a valuable fleet air-defense asset. We might also, incidentally, wonder whether the same system would be even more valuable on board a long-endurance UAV.
Focusing on the information we can obtain from the targeting radars on board enemy bombers suggests that we may want to shape our own tactics to force him to use those radars, by denying him the advantages of longer-range sensors not directly connected with the bombers. That was certainly a U.S. Navy priority during the Cold War against the Soviets. If we are developing the systems needed to face other sophisticated enemies now, the Cold War tactical experience—properly updated—would seem relevant. For example, the Soviets depended heavily on passive electronics to detect targets among the mass of ships at sea. We learned to shut down our emissions and also to decoy.
The fleet can base its response to an incoming threat on the picture all its assets, including the F-35, create. In many cases those assets are not well adapted to the particular threat. Some fighters, for example, may not have the radars they need to detect incoming in time to intercept. However, they may be in position to launch long-range missiles that can destroy attackers. In an integrated fleet, the airplanes and their missiles would all be subject to commands based on that integrated air picture. Isn’t that exactly how the Kidd hit the target ship? She fired on the basis of an integrated surface picture. The F/A-18 was not carrying weapons; it was carrying a radar that offered the essential input to the surface picture on the basis of which the missile was fired. In this instance, incidentally, the F/A-18 could identify the target and thus avoid the main problem of long-range antiship missile fire, which is the possibility that a missile will hit the wrong ship. That problem was one reason the U.S. Navy abandoned the antiship Tomahawk in the first place.
Enemies shoot back. Distributed lethality is about how to keep fighting despite losses, by getting as much as we can out of all our assets so that no individual ship or aircraft is so crucial that its loss cripples us. In the past, the U.S. Navy has led the world in its ability to meld its assets together for maximum value. Systems such as CEC and Link 16 are part of that story. The Kidd missile strike is its latest chapter.