An ASM “tries to avoid countermeasures by putting
a gate around where it thinks the target is, ignoring
everything else,” he said. “If you can move that gate
away from the ship, then the [ASM] won’t see the ship
at all. It will just reject that as an unnecessary return.
If you don’t fire a decoy into the gate that you’ve created, the ASM will run off and look at [the gate].
“The problem is, you really don’t know how well
you’ve done because whatever is happening is inside
the missile,” he said. “So while you’re celebrating
doing a terrific job, the missile may
be laughing and it may kill you.”
ASMs that miss their target and
fly harmlessly through a decoy
cloud are not necessarily out of
action, depending on their maneuverability and endurance. A missile
that misses one ship can lock on to
another ship in a formation. This
lesson was learned with fatal consequences during the 1982 Falklands
war, when Argentine air-launched
Exocet ASMs flew through the
chaff clouds over U.K. warships but
acquired, hit and destroyed the
British merchant ship Atlantic
Conveyor, which was full of vital
supplies and helicopters.
Friedman also is concerned
about the availability of high-quality inertial navigation systems
and Global Positioning System receivers for today’s ASMs. With
these systems, “the missile may be
able to measure your speed and
use that as a way of discriminating
from decoys. If you don’t seem to
move like a ship, [the ASM] knows
you’re a fake. Also, it may maneuver while it knows where you are
so that when you think it’s been
diverted; in fact, it knows exactly
what’s going on. It’s evading your
terminal defense.”
Friedman approves of a mix of
hard- and soft-kill systems, but he
advocates more investment in
making ships larger and therefore
more able to survive an ASM hit.
Friedman pointed out that
ASMs “are not superhuman weapons. They’re fairly small. They’ll
take out a fairly small area of the
ship. You can design a ship now
that is well hardened. A bigger ship, like an [Arleigh]
Burke- or a [Zumwalt-class destroyer], has a better
chance against any kind of foreign attack because the
missile tears up the finite part of the ship and the rest
survives.
“It gets a lot more reasonable if [you] assume that
you can still keep operating after you take a couple of
shots,” he said. “Having to be 100-percent safe usually fails. Try to be 60 to 70 percent and it’ll work pretty well.” ■
