USNI News:
The four ballistic missile defense destroyers patrolling 6th Fleet will get a self-protection upgrade beginning this year, as the Navy integrates Raytheon’s Sea Rolling Airframe Missile (SeaRAM) onto its Aegis-equipped Arleigh Burke-class destroyers (DDG-51) for the first time.
U.S. 6th Fleet leadership sent an urgent requirement for self-protection on the four ships, which focus all their energy on the BMD mission, Program Executive Officer for Integrated Warfare Systems (PEO IWS) Rear Adm. Jon Hill said last week at an American Society of Naval Engineers event.
“We put [the ships] out there by themselves, and they’re putting all their radar energy up in space, they’re tracking space objects now, and you have to wonder, hey, can they defend themselves?” he said. After toying with the idea of putting a second ship nearby to protect the BMD destroyer – much like a cruiser protecting an aircraft carrier – the Navy decided the SeaRAM could fill the self-protection requirement even though the system had never been paired with an Aegis ship before.
“What we had to do was really develop software, make sure we had the equipment ready to roll, get the computer programs aligned,” Hill told USNI News after the event.
“And the big thing you have to worry about is fratricide – so where you put that mount on the ship, it’s looking right over the vertical launching system, so what you don’t want to have happen is you’re shooting something with the SeaRAM while missiles are coming out of the VLS. So that’s the fundamental bit of integration we have to do.”
Hill added there were no extra SeaRAM systems lying around, so he pulled equipment from a foreign military sales program to allow for the quickest installation possible. He said the Navy also leveraged testing done by other programs to help speed up the process of integrating SeaRAM onto a new class of ships…
