The subsonic Naval Strike Missile flies at wave-top height and has no active seeker, making it very difficult to detect or defend against.
The Navy’s $14.8 million award to Raytheon Missile Systems and Norway’s Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace in May for an over-the-horizon (OTH) weapon system for littoral combat ships (LCSs) and the future frigate (FFG[X]) is aimed squarely at answering nagging questions about the LCS’ vulnerability in intense combat that date to the start of the program in 2003.
The Raytheon/Kongsberg team will develop Kongsberg’s Naval Strike Missile (NSM) for U.S. Navy use. Chris Daily, Raytheon’s NSM senior program director, says the company has been working with Navy officials to develop plans and schedules to “get the capability to the fleet as soon as possible.” The Navy test-launched the NSM successfully from the USS Coronado (LCS-4) in September 2014, and Raytheon and Kongsberg teamed up in April 2015.
Despite Navy assurances to Congress and Defense Department leadership over the years that the LCSs are armed and outfitted adequately, doubts about the ships’ survivability have persisted. In 2014, then-Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel instructed the Navy to come up with a new design for a ship as survivable as the rugged (now retired) Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigates. A small-surface-combatant task force developed concepts for an LCS-derivative frigate armed with a highly lethal OTH missile.
Around the same time, Vice Admiral Thomas Rowden pioneered the Navy’s “Distributed Lethality” vision, using the slogan, “If it floats, it fights.” Admiral Rowden, who recently retired as Commander, Naval Surface Forces, and Rear Admiral Peter Fanta, then-Director of Surface Warfare in the office of the Chief of Naval Operations, argued that the Navy had placed insufficient emphasis on building offensive warfighting capability into new surface ships. In 2016’s “Surface Force Strategy: Return to Sea Control,” the Navy declared that “our ships must be equipped with the tools necessary to fight and defeat highly capable adversaries.” It noted also that “by 2030, [LCSs] and frigates will represent half of deployed surface combatants.”
The Program Executive Office for
Unmanned and Small Combatants reiterated in late 2017 that the Navy is “fully committed” to a force of 52 small surface combatants—32 LCSs and 20 frigates—and the Navy followed up in February 2018 by awarding contracts for FFG(X) design concepts to Austal USA, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics Bath Iron Works, Huntington Ingalls Industries, and Fincantieri Marine, with procurement to begin in 2020.
Raytheon Missile Systems is the lead contractor for the Navy’s SM-2 and evolved Seasparrow antiair defense missiles, the SM-3 and SM-6 ballistic-missile-defense weapons, and the Tomahawk land-attack missile, as well as the rolling-airframe missile (RAM) and SeaRAM shipboard point-defense systems.
Daily says the NSM is fitted with an advanced state-of-the-art seeker, has a minimal radar cross-section, and is capable of sea-skimming, terrain-following, and evasive maneuvers to meet the Navy requirement of destroying targets at ranges up to 100 nautical miles. He points out that the Navy required the missile to be off-the-shelf and nondevelopmental. The Norwegian Navy has fielded the NSM on board its five Fridtjof Nansen-class frigates, which use a version of the U.S. Navy’s Aegis combat system.
Poland’s coastal defense force also has deployed the NSM, and in June, Kongsberg won a contract from Norway’s Defence Materiel Agency to provide NSMs for four new Norwegian and two German submarines, and possibly other ships.
Daily says that the OTH contract initially will provide mission-support and training equipment, including test missiles, and fire-control systems and will fund integration and testing, with deliveries of the Kongsberg-built missiles increasing during contract option years.
Raytheon will build missile launchers at its large-scale-integration facility in Louisville, Kentucky. Daily notes that a key goal will be to increase participating U.S. suppliers from about a dozen (roughly 25 percent at present) eventually to 50 percent or more. Ducommun Industries will build the fire-control system. Whelen Engineering will provide large structural launcher components, and Diab Group is building a composite box for the launchers. Raytheon will carry out integration and final assembly at its Tucson, Arizona, plant.
Mr. Walsh is a veteran reporter of Navy and Marine Corps news and the former editor of Naval Systems Update.