May 8, 2019 – RDML Kent Whalen, USN, Ret., a member of The SPECTRUM Group’s Navy Team, is the author of “The Navy Needs Better Weapons“, a feature in the May 2019 issue of Proceedings, the U.S. Naval Institute’s monthly publication. In the article, Admiral Whalen discusses the urgent need for the U.S. Navy to prioritize weapons, technologies, and capabilities that meet the mission needs of today and tomorrow.
An excerpt of the article is provided below. For the full article, please visit the May 2019 issue of USNI’s Proceedings magazine.
The Navy Needs Better Weapons
Range is critical, but a shooting contest also requires speed, large warheads, and magazine depth.
By Rear Admiral Kent Whalen, U.S. Navy (Retired)
May 2019 | Proceedings | Vol. 145/5/1,395
Consider a scenario: Two warships approach each other, initially from outside the range of their antiship weapons. Which will fire and strike first: The ship that first detects the other? The ship with the longest-range weapon? Or the ship with the shorter range but faster weapon? Perhaps the better question is, Who will take the first shot from maximum effective range with valid targeting and a time to launch and speed of flight inside the adversary’s?
The situation is multi-variable and dynamic. And it is something every commanding officer (CO) who sails into the western Pacific considers before bringing, for example, a ship defended by the RGM-84 Harpoon (maximum range: 80 nautical miles) inside the 125-nautical-mile range of a Chinese YJ-83J shooter.
The militaries of the world’s major powers have been on a weapon development timeline that started in the modern era with ballistic bombs and guns and soon will progress to “prompt global strike”—the ability to launch conventional weapons remotely from tremendous range while hitting with precision and speed. Along the way, the powers developed missiles that required radar guidance all the way to impact; to missiles equipped with highly effective onboard acquisition-and-targeting radars; and now laser- and satellite-guided bombs, all with steadily increasing range and power.
Outranging the Enemy
Today’s U.S. Navy sails with weapons that do not outrange those of its two main rivals—not only antiship missiles, but also air-to-air, air-defense, and undersea weapons delivered from surface ships or aircraft. (The submarine-launched Mk 48 torpedo remains quite formidable). A warrior ideally would like weapons with a range at least 1.5 times an enemy’s equivalent. With that, he or she could sit outside the enemy’s defensive perimeter and fire with impunity.
Over the past several years, the Navy has developed all kinds of Band-Aid fixes to the range problem—substituting weapons, adding new technology to old systems, and even modifying fleet operations strategy. These workarounds are necessary to maintain the ability to win in the near term—but they should be recognized as temporary fixes, not permanent solutions.