Richard Casady wrote:
On Thu, 14 Aug 2008 15:40:55 -0400, hk wrote:

I'd like to know how a ship is supposed to avoid being hit by a
wave-hopping, supersonic missile "steered" by a couple of guys via a
video camera on the weapon and a laptop computer. That's where anti-ship
missile technology is headed.

You mostly have to shoot them down. Spitfires chased the first guided
missiles, V-1's during WWII. They had to be high and dive on the
missiles as they were slightly faster. You can get a hand aimed 95 lb
20mm cannon with 1000RPM and 3300 ft/sec MV. You could put a hundred
of them just below the flight deck edges on a carrier. Take care of
the speedboats, at least. And any ship with hundreds of marines could
man a bunch of machine guns. They have some fifties now, but a state
of the art 20mm would be nice, and not very expensive.
You can jam a control radio link, and they can home on the jammer.
Chaff has been known to work against a radar only missile. missiles
however, could have both radar and infrared homing. Defence gets
harder and harder.

Casady


You could do a lot of things, but that doesn't mean any of them would work.

The V-1's flew at less than 400 mph, made a loud noise, and could be
shot down. The Exocets could achieve Mach .9. Imagine a "stealthed"
anti-ship missile coming just over the wavetops at Mach 2 or faster.

Please understand I am not knocking the capabilities of these huge
warships. Obviously, they are potent projectors of force. The point is,
though, that they are huge and inviting targets, and technology is
providing those who would like to damage or sink them with interesting
high-tech weapons.

Future wars are going to be far more dependent upon quality intel and
intelligent people to interpret it than on nuclear powered battle
fleets. As the ongoing war against Iraq proves, the fact that we have
every technological advantage there has not resulted in our pacifying
that country.