Tracked & Destroyed: U.S. Navy Successfully Takes Down Over the Horizon Missile

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By Kris Osborn – Warrior Maven

(Washington D.C.) An attacking enemy anti-ship missile can approach from hundreds of miles away beyond the visible horizon, making them less detectable to line of sight radar systems and other kinds of ship-integrated threat sensors …. But what if they could not only be seen, but destroyed, at much farther ranges? Wouldn’t ship defenders have a vastly improved ability to stop a potentially catastrophic attack? 

This is the rationale informing a recent Navy experiment off the coast of San Diego, Calif., where the service broke new ground using drones, missiles and manned platforms together to track and eliminate an enemy target.  

“The U.S. Navy launched a missile at a long-range target successfully as a part of Unmanned Integrated Battle Problem 21 off the coast of San Diego, April 25,” a Navy report stated. “Integrated manned and unmanned systems established a track for the launch.”

Range is the key issue here, along with mesh networking and multi-domain information relay involving unmanned systems, as ship-fired interceptors have for quite some time been able to follow radar and fire-control guidance to destroy attacking threats. This strike, however, was described in the Navy report as “beyond line of sight.” 

The target intercept used an “Extended Range Active Missile” SM-6 launched from a Navy destroyer, the USS John Finn. 

The human-machine interface element of this is also quite significant, as the Navy has been operating a beyond-line-of-sight intercept system for several years now called Naval Integrated Fire Control – Counter Air (NIFC-CA).  NIFC-CA connects ship-based radar with an aerial sensor node such as an E2D Hawkeye or even an F-35 to relay sensor information to the ship from beyond the horizon to ship-based fire control to launch an SM-6 interceptor. The system, first deployed on Navy destroyers in 2015, is intended to locate and destroy attacking threats such as anti-ship missiles from ranges beyond the horizon. Naturally this extends the crucial time window with which ship commanders can determine the best response to an incoming enemy attack. Which interceptor or element of a ship’s layered defenses are best for this particular threat? A ship commander with more time can optimize defensive maneuvers, therefore increasingly the likelihood the ship will survive.