Getting more value for our defense dollar has gained in urgency as we have seen the proliferation of cheap drones that can severely damage a ship.
Commentary
In order to defend its ships and defeat its enemies, our Navy needs to employ inexpensive, highly effective missiles such as those that Israel is now making standard on its ships. It also needs to take advantage of the great strides in gun technology to provide its ships with a big boost in air defense capabilities.
As it stands, the
Navy is paying far too much for missiles, but getting more value for our defense dollar has gained in urgency as we have seen the proliferation of cheap drones costing
well below $20,000 that can severely damage a ship. While one of these cheap drones is highly unlikely to sink one of our destroyers, a single drone of this ilk is perfectly capable of damaging or destroying critical communications systems, radars, and so forth. And a large swarm of these drones is very much a threat to any ship in our fleet.
The problem is that, currently, the main weapons we can deploy to defend against these cheap drones are expensive missiles that range in cost from more than $900,000 to more than
$4 million each. Even if we can count on these missiles to be 100 percent effective, using them to defend against an opponent that can direct hundreds of drones at one of our ships or even thousands over an extended period makes relying on these expensive missiles unsustainable.
Fortunately, there is a solution to the problem of our missiles costing many times what they should—and its name is
Tamir. The Tamir missile is the toothy part of Israel’s C-Dome system, which itself is the marinized version of Israel’s famed Iron Dome air defense system. At only $50,000 each, Tamir missiles are more than a match for any drone and can also be used to destroy both cruise and ballistic missiles. And with
43 miles of range, they can destroy drones and missiles that our ships in the Red Sea have been forced to destroy using multimillion-dollar missiles because they have nothing less expensive that they can use.
But cheaper, far more cost-effective missiles are only one element of what our Navy needs to face the dangerous new world of cheap lethal drone swarms.
Another key element is to take advantage of
advanced guns that can easily destroy dozens of incoming drones for a fraction of the cost of a missile. A great example of such a gun is Oto Melara’s 76-mm Super Rapid. While the Super Rapid can fire unguided rounds, its real strength comes from its ability to fire both GPS-guided rounds and radar-guided rounds.
In particular, its semi-active radar-guided round,
the DART, was designed to kill both missiles and small boats and is very capable of destroying much slower, more fragile drones. Indeed, the Italian Navy has already been
using the Oto Melara 76 mm guns on its destroyers to shoot down Houthi drones threatening shipping in the Red Sea.
While there is no formal figure published, with the cheap drones being quite slow, typically well below 200 miles per hour, as well as being more fragile than a typical cruise missile, it seems likely, given its reported capabilities, that a single Super Rapid could engage and destroy more than a dozen at a time. Couple this with a full magazine of C-Dome Tamir missiles, and you have a ship capable of not only defending itself but also of defending other ships within at least a 30-mile radius and up to 40 miles in some cases.
In terms of cost, the Super Rapid is a bargain, with the 17,000-pound system coming in at an estimated
$3 million: less than it costs to buy one of the $4.3 million SM-6 missiles that have been used in the Red Sea. While there is no published price list for the DART ammo, purchasing it by the hundreds of thousands of rounds should enable volume pricing of less than a few thousand dollars per round, potentially allowing a ship equipped with these guns to destroy cheap drones for less than what it cost the enemy to acquire them.
Of course, along with hard-kill solutions such as guns and missiles, our military needs to be working to develop and deploy electronic warfare solutions that will jam, disable, or even gain control over enemy drones. However, such
soft-kill systems do not negate the need for guns and missiles capable of killing drones; instead, they are complementary.
Finally, although integrating C-Domes and Super Rapid gun systems into our warships will cost a lot of money, given the exorbitant cost of the missiles that our ships are currently using to destroy $5,000 drones, the payback period of such an investment would be short, resulting in a Navy better able to defend itself and other ships for less money.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
