By Kris Osborn, President, Center for Military Modernization
The Navy is firing off its upgraded 5-inch deck guns in the Pacific from its warships, demonstrating a longer-range, reduced signature, improved “propelling charge,” and expanded land-attack capability.
The USS Russell (DDG 59) destroyer is conducting live fire preparations with its Mk 45 Mod 4 5-inch guns. These famous weapons have a long and distinguished history, with some earlier variants spanning back to the WWII era. The Navy has in recent years been deeply immersed in various innovative high-tech efforts to improve the range and guidance technology of its time-honored 5-inch guns.
The Mk 45 Mod 4 incorporates a larger 62-caliber barrel, strengthened gun and what Navy and BAE Systems engineers refer to as “advanced control system.” The round is not guided, yet it has been modified with newer “Cargo” projectiles able to blanket an area with suppressive fire, defend well against attacking enemy boat swarms and attack wide-area targets by “dispensing its munitions over a wide area.”
“This round carries 49 Mark 2 submunitions, which are a variation of the Army’s M-80 DPICM. This round is designed to explode above the ground in order to dispense its munitions over a wide area. ….This round may also be used against surface targets, especially high-speed attack boats, where its wide dispersal pattern is considered to be very useful,” an interesting write up from warships.com states.
An interesting Navy essay on the Mk 45 Mod 4 explains it as a critical Anti-Surface and Anti-Air and land attack Naval Surface Fire Support weapon. The longer 62-caliber barrel improves the weapon’s land attack capacity, the Navy essay says. Another advantage of the improved propellant and barrel is that the Mod 4 has a range of 20 nautical miles, nearly double the 11-or-12-mile range of historically fired 5-inch guns.
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This seems to introduce various tactical nuances, as an ability to “blanket” an area with suppressive fire from 20 nautical miles could slow-down or destroy an approaching fleet of attacking, swarming small boats. It could also stop or take down an aerial drone swarm once its general location was identified by sensors. The Mk 45 Mod 4 adds another, longer-range critical level of protection beyond the roughly five-mile range of Navy Close-in-Weapons-Systems which use a Phalanx gun to fire hundreds of small interceptor projectiles per minute. The Mk 45 and CWIS can together generate layers of a blanket or “area’ of protection extending miles beyond the deck of a surface warship. This provides better stand-off distances and put ups barriers and defenses against incoming air and surface attacks.
Extended and improved land-attack possibilities enabled by the Mk 45 Mod 4 are also quite significant, particularly in the Pacific, as they could blanket island areas or coastal regions in support of an amphibious attack.
In recent years there have been numerous developmental efforts to engineer and deploy a precision-guided 5-inch gun round, something which will likely still come to fruition. However, there is still a key tactical advantage for using an unguided “area” weapon as well, given that it can deliver suppressive fire, blanket an area with protection or simply “deny” access to incoming enemy forces.
Kris Osborn is President of Warrior Maven – Center for Military Modernization. Osborn previously served at the Pentagon as a Highly Qualified Expert with the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army—Acquisition, Logistics & Technology. Osborn has also worked as an anchor and on-air military specialist at national TV networks. He has appeared as a guest military expert on Fox News, MSNBC, The Military Channel, and The History Channel. He also has a Masters Degree in Comparative Literature from Columbia University.
