NAVSEA's new Rapid Capability Office gives Weapon Systems LEGGO like capabilities for "plug and play"
The capability of placing sophisticated air defense missiles and Aegis radars on platforms of opportunity like unmanned surface ships, barges, and LCS would seem a perfect solution to the Navy's problem of shielding shipping in the Red Sea from Houthi UAV and ASCM or AS ballistic missiles without stationing DDG. NAVSEA Rapid Capability Office's Jim Juster seems just the man to make it happen.
Navy Rapid Capabilities Process Can Now Deploy New Weapons Faster - USNI News:
ARLINGTON, Va. – In 2021, unmanned surface vessel Ranger sailed from the West Coast with an innocuous shipping container that hid a guided-missile launcher.
Off the coast of California, the container opened and fired a Standard Missile 6 – ordinarily a mainstay of guided-missile warships equipped with powerful air search radars and the complex Aegis Combat System.
The experiment unshackled the SM-6 missile from a $2 billion warship using a portable version of the Aegis combat system and connections to off board sensors to hit a target over the horizon, Jim Juster, https://www.linkedin.com/in/jim-juster-28789b7a/ a former surface warfare officer, said earlier this month at the Surface Navy 2024 exposition.
“What we did was take some mature technology that a DoD partner developed. We put it together with a portable version of the Aegis combat system that we developed [and] we put that together with an over-the-horizon targeting loop,” Juster said.
“When we integrated those three things together, we now had a portable
version of the Aegis combat system that we could stick some place
besides a destroyer or cruiser.”
Weapons tests on ships is nothing new across the myriad of the research arms in the Pentagon, but getting the capability to the fleet sometimes proved elusive, Juster said.
“That’s usually where we stopped. And my boss for a long time looked at me and said, ‘cool experiment, now what?’ and that’s usually where we would end,” Juster said.
The experiment on the Ranger was different and is proving out a new way to rapidly field new types of weapons across the U.S. military by mixing and matching mature capabilities across the services to field an operational capability in months instead of years. To that end, PEO IWS stood up its own rapid capabilities office last year. The new office, which Juster oversees, formalizes the experimentation and gets the capabilities to the fleet.
“Here’s the trick: Within existing authorities that acquisition organizations have, we can authorize things to go on deployment … if we can find the money for it, we can go and field that,” Juster said.
“That’s how we can do rapid capability. It doesn’t solve every problem. It doesn’t solve aircraft carriers and it doesn’t solve quantum cryptography.”
For example, the idea behind the test on Ranger morphed into
the Army’s Typhon missile system, which is based around a Lockheed
Martin Mk 70 launcher that can plug into a variety of radars. The Army
plans to field the first Typhon in the Pacific later this year, according to a report in Breaking Defense.
The Typhon system was then tested in a live fire experiment aboard Littoral Combat Ship USS Savannah (LCS-26) using the Lockheed Martin MK 70 and an Army Q-53 counterfire radar, USNI News first reported last year.
A similar experiment aboard an LCS with a Naval Strike Missile in 2014 eventually led to the Navy awarding a contract for the missiles, four years later with the first missiles deploying a year after that.
Now, under the new deployment construct, a tested version of the SM-6 launcher could deploy as an operational tool.
“That’s now offensive strike capability we can stick somewhere else,” Juster said.
“If we can find the money, we can authorize these things. We can send
them on deployment. This is the thing we can do if you want to have more
players on the field, if you want to have more shooters where we don’t
have them already. This is one way to do it.”
Littoral Combat Ship Fires a Standard Missile 6 from Experimental Launcher at Sea - USNI News
The Navy fired a Standard Missile 6 from an experimental missile
launcher mounted on a Littoral Combat Ship Tuesday in the Eastern
Pacific, the sea service announced.
Photos of the test show the system firing the SM-6 from the launcher positioned on the flight deck of USS Savannah (LCS-26).
Savannah “conducted a live-fire demonstration in the Eastern Pacific Ocean utilizing a containerized launching system that fired an SM-6 missile at a designated target,” reads the statement from U.S. Naval Surface Force to USNI News.
“The exercise demonstrated the modularity and lethality of Littoral Combat Ships and the ability to successfully integrate a containerized weapons system to engage a surface target. The exercise will inform continued testing, evaluation and integration of containerized weapons systems on afloat platforms.”
A Navy spokesman would not confirm the launcher when asked by USNI News, but the photos show a Lockheed Martin Mk 70 containerized launching system. The MK 70 launcher is one of four prototype launchers – based on the MK 41 vertical launch system used aboard the Navy’s guided-missile warships – Lockheed Martin completed for the U.S. Army as part of the service’s Typhon program
“That partnership enabled us to leverage technologies across our ships, launchers and combat systems programs to design, develop, integrate and quickly deliver a solution to meet the Army’s mission requirements,” Joe DePietro, Lockheed Martin general manager and vice president, said in a statement at the time.
Typhon is part of a new Army effort to field land-based precision fires with ranges up to thousands of miles. In addition to the SM-6, the MK 70 can also fire Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles.
The Army and Marines began developing land-based Tomahawk launchers in 2019 following the expiration of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty with Russia that forbade all land-based ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers.
“The ban applied to missiles with nuclear or conventional warheads but did not apply to sea-based or air-delivered missiles,” according to a June 27, 2019, Congressional Research Service report about the treaty.
The risk the 1987 treaty hoped to avert was a nuclear missile system that could secretly launch close to a country’s border with little to no warning unlike the massive intercontinental ballistic missiles that would give more warning to an adversary.
In addition to the Standard Missile family and TLAMS, Lockheed has also tested deploying an Army Patriot anti-air PAC-3 missile from a MK 41.
USNI News reported last month the containerized launcher and an Army Q-53 counterfire radar was spotted on Savannah’s flight deck while the LCS was in port in San Diego, Calif. It’s unclear what radar and combat system was used to cue and fire the missile, however, USNI News understands the MK 70 has been used with multiple radar systems.
The Pentagon’s Strategic Capabilities Office fired an SM-6 using a similar containerized missile launcher from the autonomous Ghost Fleet Overlord test ship Ranger in 2021.
The Navy conducted a similar test with the Naval Strike Missile in 2014 aboard USS Coronado (LCS-4) ahead of the system being installed in Independence-class LCS deploying to the Western Pacific.
The latest missile test comes as the Navy is set to start upgrades to the LCS it will keep in inventory to increase the lethal power of the ships.
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