The US Navy would start fielding an anti-ship version of its Tomahawk cruise missile on destroyers by late September in what US Fleet Forces Command Admiral Daryl Caudle sees as a “game-changer” against a numerically superior Chinese fleet.
An anti-ship version of the US’ best-known non-nuclear missile, which is currently used for land attack, would greatly increase the service’s lethality, Caudle said.
“The more fungible you make a weapon, the more utility it has for different circumstances,” he said.
Photo: Screengrab from Defense Visual Information Distribution Service’s Web site
Fielding a new seaborne version of the Tomahawk would add to a growing US arsenal of ship-attack weapons, such as the new Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile, complementing submarine-launched torpedoes in the event of conflict in Asia.
Building it for submarine and destroyer launch would “make it a very high-utility weapon,” he said.
The navy plans to start fielding the new missiles on destroyers by Sept. 30 and make them available for submarine deployments between April and June next year once they complete testing, Tomahawk deputy program manager Chip Whipkey said.
The service is looking to purchase as many as 1,302 Maritime Strike Tomahawks from RTX Corp.
The schedule for outfitting the new maritime strike missile on destroyers fits roughly within the Pentagon’s plan to field thousands of drones in the Indo-Pacific region to counter China. That is known as the Replicator program, which the military aims to deploy on a large scale in August.
The navy’s growing arsenal also uses artificial intelligence algorithms on its submarine sonar systems “to help distinguish man-made noise sources from biological sources” such as fish, Caudle said.
China’s projected massive naval increase has fixated lawmakers intent on pouring billions into US warship construction to boost the navy’s roughly 300 inventory.
The US estimates that China’s fleet of more than 370 ships, including submarines and aircraft carriers, would grow to 435 by 2030.
Still, Caudle urged caution in launching into a “shipbuilding arms race,” saying the focus should be on US capabilities per vessel.
“It’s tempting to get in a shipbuilding arms race where we really are trying to go tit-for-tat, where we’re judging the value of combat power of a naval force by the numbers,” he said. “I don’t think that’s a good strategy.”
“A better strategy is to build high-end, highly capable, large payload volume ships like we have,” Caudle said, citing Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers and the US fleet submarines aircraft carriers.
A projected increase in China’s fleet comes with challenges, including more munitions purchases and crew, he said.
“You have to crew all those ships. You have to sustain all those ships. You’ve got to have a place for them to moor” and have housing for the crew, he said. “So it’s not just buying ships.”
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