Navies raise their air- and missile-defence game

Louis Bearn & Nick Childs

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Navies are shoring up their shipborne air-defence capabilities given the increasingly complex threats to surface units, with maritime forces drawing upon lessons from current conflicts. Asia has set the pace for developments in recent years, but air-defence requirements are becoming increasingly prominent on European maritime order books.

A new race is on among navies to shore up their shipborne air defences in the face of threats that are becoming more potent and more complex. Naval platforms are increasingly called upon to defend against faster and more capable anti-ship and land-attack cruise and ballistic missiles, many of which are proliferating among states and non-state actors. On top of that, current conflicts are driving a new focus on the threat of small and difficult-to-detect uninhabited aerial vehicles (UAVs) and direct-attack munitions that can overwhelm traditional shipborne air defences.

Moving targets

On 19 October, amid the Hamas–Israel war, the Pentagon announced that the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer USS Carney, operating in the Red Sea, had shot down a number of cruise missiles and UAVs launched by Yemen’s Ansarullah (Houthi) movement and potentially headed for Israel. Among the weapons used by the ship were Standard SM-2 missiles. Subsequently, the destroyers USS Thomas Hudner and USS Mason also downed air threats reportedly from locations in Yemen.

In the Ukraine conflict, Kyiv’s sinking of the Russian Black Sea Fleet flagship Moskva in April last year with land-based Neptune anti-ship missiles also set alarm bells ringing. There were multiple factors in the ship’s demise, but among them was that the ship’s ostensibly formidable legacy Soviet-era air defences were evidently not up to the job.

Arming up

The United States changed the game in naval air defence in the 1980s by introducing the Aegis combat system, the first such system capable of identifying, tracking and engaging multiple challenging targets simultaneously. The US has been steadily upgrading the system on its ships ever since, including with ballistic-missile defence (BMD) capability.

Europe followed, either adopting Aegis or building ships with similar systems. But it is Asia that has recently set the pace in procuring modern and high-capability air-defence surface combatants. China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN), and the navies of Australia, India, Japan and South Korea, have all been investing in such platforms. Currently, Asia is the only region building such ships in the cruiser class.

Beijing’s investment in strike systems, including anti-ship ballistic missiles such as the DF-21D and DF-26B, has helped spur Western ship upgrades. The PLAN is also fitting the modern YJ-18 anti-ship and land-attack cruise missile to surface units, attack submarines and aircraft. In the Euro-Atlantic arena, the Russian navy has started fielding the Zircon very-high-speed anti-ship and land-attack missile.

Japan and South Korea are both upgrading their naval air-defence capabilities, including with BMD capacity. Now, Europe’s navies are picking up the pace. They have a higher percentage of ageing legacy platforms than Asia’s fleets.

European order books

The United Kingdom’s Royal Navy plans to add Sea Ceptor missiles to its Type-45 destroyers to supplement their current longer-range Sea Viper systems (the UK’s version of the European Principal Anti-Air Missile System – PAAMS – using the Aster 15 and 30 missiles). A Sea Viper Evolution programme is also under way to improve ballistic- and cruise-missile defence capability.

France and Italy, meanwhile, have announced a mid-life anti-air warfare programme for their equivalent Horizon destroyers, equipped with PAAMS. The German Navy is also upgrading its Sachsen-class destroyers, replacing their SMART-L long-range radars with a TRS-4D/LR ROT system, providing these ships with enhanced ballistic-missile detection and tracking. The Netherlands has upgraded the SMART-L radars on its De Zeven Provinciën-class destroyers for BMD. Denmark is upgrading the weapons fit of its Iver Huitfeldt ships with SM-2s.

Air-defence capabilities also feature more prominently in the specifications for new principal surface combatants. Poland and the UK, for example, are advancing plans to integrate the Sea Ceptor missile into the Polish navy’s future Miecznik-class frigates, a significant advance on the navy’s current capabilities in this area.

In the longer term, Germany – possibly in conjunction with the Netherlands – and Italy are planning 10,000-tonne-plus cruisers for their future air-defence platforms, as is potentially the UK. In the US, the future DDG(X) ships will likely be significantly larger even than the latest Flight III Arleigh Burkes, which are already close to tipping the scales as cruisers.

Aiming high and low

The dilemma for major navies is reconciling more demanding air-defence requirements – implying larger and more expensive platforms – with the aim of more distributed fleets with greater numbers of cheaper ships. Although technology may offer distributed, networked air-defence solutions on such lower-cost vessels, such designs do not exist, yet.

Another emerging challenge is the lower-end one of swarming UAVs and cheap loitering munitions. Pitting missiles costing hundreds of thousands of dollars against such threats costing a fraction thereof is not a good trade-off unless it prevents a billion dollars of platform damage. But even then, such an approach is unsustainable since it would quickly deplete ships’ magazines.

The US has been at the forefront of developing radar-guided close-in weapons (CIWSs) like the Phalanx that can be adapted to deal with new, lower-end threats, while new lower-cost gun and missile systems and electronic-warfare capabilities are also under development. In the longer term, directed-energy weapons may be a large part of the solution, and all major navies are exploring these, but progress has been slow.

For most navies, just like their land-forces counterparts, air-defence challenges are taking on greater urgency, reflecting lessons from current conflicts.