Popular Mechanics:
Back in 2014, the guided missile-carrying destroyer USS John Paul Jones made history. During a live fire missile tests, one of its SM-6 air defense missiles completed the longest surface-to-air engagement in naval history. The Navy wouldn’t say the exact range of the missile for security’s sake, but the ability to take out incoming missiles or aircraft at long range is obviously valuable.
Now, that ability is expanding. The Navy says it will modify the Raytheon-built Standard Missile-6 to act as a supersonic anti-ship missile. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter has confirmed the service was developing the anti-ship SM-6 in an effort to give Navy cruisers and destroyers a weapon capable of reaching such targets more than 200 nautical miles away.
“We are going to create a brand-new capability,” Carter said during a February 10 press conference in San Diego. “We’re modifying the SM-6 so that in addition to missile defense, it can also target enemy ships at sea at very long ranges.”
This new capability is clearly aimed at countering the surface strike threat from increasingly sophisticated Chinese naval assets, forcing them to stand off at ranges more favorable to U.S. aircraft carriers. The AGM-158C Long Range Anti-Ship Missile, also under development, has the same purpose and an even longer potential range. The SM-6, which boasts a top speed of Mach 3.5, should offer American cruisers and destroyers a weapon with considerably more than the reported 67 nautical-mile range of the current Boeing RGM-84 Harpoon anti-surface missile which was first introduced in the late 1970s.
How much more? Raytheon won’t provide more details, but assuming Carter’s statement that the SM-6 in development would be capable of reaching a target “over 200 miles away” is conservative, and recognizing that the official published SM-6 range is 150 miles, it wouldn’t be outlandish to expect that an anti-ship SM-6 would quadruple the range of the Harpoon.
The SM-6’s builder did give us a few tidbits. According to Michael Campisi, Raytheon’s senior program director for the SM-6, there are no plans for the modified SM-6 to have a different warhead than its air-interceptor cousin. Campisi also reveals that the anti-ship version probably will use the same seeker as the anti-air version. “SM-6 is a multi-mission missile,” he asserts. “One configuration performs all missions.”…
