個人積分：2800分
文章編號：74721871
On Sept. 3, the stealthy littoral combat ship Gabrielle Giffords slipped out of San Diego, carrying a new vessel-killing missile that could transform it into the high tech mauler its inventors always hoped it would become.
It sailed for the western Pacific, where rising powers such as China and Russia seek to challenge America’s long control of the sea.
Sister trimarin-hulled LCS Montgomery left San Diego three months three months earlier and awaits it, already forward-deployed and operating out of Singapore.
The twin deployments to the western Pacific come after the troubled LCS program had been in stand down mode for 19 months as Navy leaders tried to a program plagued by cost overruns, technology glitches and leadership snafus.
But this time Gabrielle Giffords carries the new Naval Strike Missile, marking the first time the weapons system has deployed on an LCS. The Raytheon/Kongsberg-made NSM can destroy an enemy ship from more than 100 nautical miles away, hurtling at high subsonic speed while its electronic brain homes in on its target.
That’s about 30 nautical miles farther than the published range of the Harpoon missile it replaces, officials say. And it’s so precise that sailors can pinpoint where it will spear into a vessel, such as blowing apart an engine room or decapitating a bridge.
Navy leaders declined to talk on the record about the what this missile means for potential foes overseas, but they’ll whisper that the NSM’s longer range complicates matters for adversaries.
They now have to worry about where all U.S. ships, great and small, are located because of the reach of the weapons systems on them.
個人積分：662分
文章編號：74722121
Macquarie150 wrote:
Armed with...(恕刪)
Packed with weapons and sensors with longer ranges and increased lethality, the presence of a meaner and more dependable LCS promises to free up destroyers and cruisers for more important missions, but defense analysts also see them as part of a larger push to better match capabilities with rising Pacific powers.
They point to ongoing Navy’s efforts to field the MQ-25 Stingray unmanned aerial refueling drone to hike the speed and range of the service’s mainstay aircraft, now that Chinese ship-zapping ballistic missiles make it riskier for U.S. carriers to operate in the region.
“It’s great that the Navy is doing these improvements, but it’s very incremental,” said Bryan Clark, a retired submarine officer and analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. "It has been a decade since the Navy said: ‘Hey, we need to start an unmanned aircraft program of some kind, and we need put better anti-ship missiles on our ships.’
“And here we are, 10 years later, and the MQ-25 is still making its way toward fielding, which won’t happen for several years, and we’re finally deploying a ship with a better anti-ship cruise missile. So kudos to the Navy for doing it, but this is emblematic of the problem the [Department of Defense] has in making the shift toward new ways of fighting.
"It just can’t get out of its own way to field a new capability in under a decade.”
https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2019/09/16/armed-with-a-new-missile-the-lcs-comes-of-age/
為甚麼不把全文貼出來? 是不是最後的這一段傷到你綠綠的玻璃心?
個人積分：4661分
文章編號：74724155
個人積分：26485分
文章編號：74730646
