Top Tester Tells Navy To Test Carrier, Destroyer Defenses With Real Missiles & Explosions

[unhappycamper]

http://breakingdefense.com/2014/01/top-tester-tells-navy-to-test-carrier-destroyer-defenses-with-real-missiles-explosions/



A US Navy carrier, the USS Roosevelt, undergoing “full-ship shock trials” using live explosives.

Top Tester Tells Navy To Test Carrier, Destroyer Defenses With Real Missiles & Explosions
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
on January 31, 2014 at 4:33 PM

You’d expect the nation’s top weapons tester to be a stickler about testing. But there’s “rigorous testing” and then there’s “let’s shoot cruise missiles at you and see what happens.”

It’s not that the Navy is wimpy about testing. The service conducts “full-ship shock trials” like the USS Roosevelt test pictured above, where it sets off a huge explosion next to a ship with a test crew aboard, as in this video of the destroyer USS Winston Churchill:

The Pentagon’s famously tough Director of Operational Test and Evaluation wants to Navy to speed up such shock testing on its new aircraft carrier, the cutting-edge and high-cost USS Gerald Ford. (More on that below). But a shock trial tests the ship’s structural strength, not its ability to shoot down incoming anti-ship missiles moving at hundreds or even thousands of miles per hour.

Even DOT&E doesn’t want the Navy to shoot live missiles directly at ships with live people on them: They want the Navy to build a new “unmanned test ship” and fire the missiles at that. Before the Navy can really say its latest self-defense systems are ready for prime time, DOT&E argues in its latest annual report (click here for full coverage), the military needs to test them under the most realistic conditions: at sea, installed on a real ship, with real missiles inbound. You just have no real sailors onboard in case the defenses don’t quite work as planned.

[LiberalArkie]

1. Why not populate the ship with the builders engineers, planners and executives.

[TheBlackAdder]

2. Back in the 1980's or 90's, when the Exocet was all the rage, a small report came out...

I can't remember what trade press it was in, but the gist of the article is below.


China was heavily investing in anti-ship missiles capable of supersonic flight. Their goal is not to have a large navy, but one that can simultaneously fire dozens of anti-ship missiles into a carrier group, overwhelming their anti-missile defenses.


Even if the US Navy can test a ship's capability to defend against one missile:

What happens if an enemy simultaneously unleashes a slew of anti-ship missiles at a ship or carrier group?