Navy Littoral Combat Ship to Fire HELLFIRE Missiles at Land Targets

Video Above: Navy Connects Air, Surface, Underseas Drones

By Kris Osborn – President & Editor-In-Chief, Warrior Maven

The US Navy Littoral Combat Ship will soon be firing deck-launched HELLFIRE missiles from the ocean into land targets as part of the service’s fast-paced development of its Surface Warfare Mission Package integrated onto the ship

Surface-to-Surface Mission Module (SSMM)

The HELLFIRE-firing component of the Surface Warfare Mission package, now integrated onto LCS ships, is an attack system known as the Surface-to-Surface Mission Module (SSMM). For most of its existence, the SSMM was primarily thought of as a counter-drone, aircraft and helicopter weapon able to track and destroy air and surface threats in ocean warfare engagements. 

Now, not surprisingly given the multi-domain focus of current Pentagon strategy, Navy weapons developers are thinking about firing the SSMM’s HELLFIRES at land targets.

Capt. Gus Weeks, Program Manager for LCS Mission Modules, said that during an upcoming exercise, the service will fire SSMM-launched HELLFIRES at land targets. Weeks said the demonstration is “going to be an exercise to determine whether or not we can utilize the SSMM to engage a stationary land target…..we’re trying to see if we can employ it a little differently,” speaking to an audience at the 2022 Surface Navy Association Symposium.

The Navy ship, engineered and up-gunned to use speed and its shallow draft to access ports, coastal areas and other high threat regions less accessible to deeper draft ships. While initially conceived of as a “littoral” platform, the Navy has in more recent years added lethality to the platform with things like the Naval Strike Missile, an over-the-horizon, deck-launched offensive strike missile.