Navy Warships Will Destroy Enemy ICBMs

By Kris Osborn, President, Center for Military Modernization

(Washington DC) The U.S. Navy’s ship-launched Standard Missile-3 has a distinguished and significant history firing from vertical launch systems on destroyers and cruisers.

But a specific kind of progress in recent years places the weapon in an entirely new paradigm.

SM-3: The ICBM Stopper

The newest SM-3 variant, Block IIA, has shown it can actually play a role in taking down enemy intercontinental ballistic missiles.

It can do so by being thrust just beyond the boundary of the Earth’s atmosphere, where it can take out an ICBM just as the missile finishes its mid-course phase and descends into a terminal phase within the atmosphere.

This is incredibly significant and a historic breakthrough that was first confirmed during a test in 2020.

SM-3s are exo-atmospheric interceptor missiles designed to destroy incoming short- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles as they approach the boundaries of the Earth’s atmosphere while traveling from space. They have for many years proven effective against short-, medium-, and long-range ballistic missiles.

The SM-3 IIA is the first variant to show an ability to destroy ICBMs traveling through space.