Advancing Soft Kill Capability Through Improved Payload Positioning
The threat to
ships from ASMs continues to increase in intensity, complexity and variety as
missile designers seek to counter the latest advances in ships’ defensive
systems. To improve penetration against hard kill, missile designers implement
very low RCS and high manoeuvrability, waypoints, sea skimming profiles and
supersonic speeds. To counter ships’
electronic countermeasures (soft kill), designers can consider millimetric RF frequencies,
IR/EO tracking, laser guidance and improved detection and tracking logic. The
enemy will then group up missiles in stream or split axis attacks to overwhelm
defences.
To provide a
high probability of escaping hit, ships’ defensive systems should contain a
hard and soft kill mix with each addressing the more difficult aspects in the threat
matrix in the most cost effective way. Soft kill very much has a part to play.
The
presentation concentrates on soft kill aspects and addresses initially an overall
summary of the various ploys against such attacks.
The
presentation then addresses particular soft kill ploys and the step improvement
in probability of escaping hit that occurs when the payload can be better
positioned thereby improving replication of the ship, especially when the ship
is in constrained waters and adverse wind conditions.
In summary, recent
work at Chemring Countermeasures shows that trainable launchers provide a
qualitative improvement to the effectiveness of all off-board countermeasures.
The presentation concludes with the consideration of a new 130mm trainable launching
system with design features to counter a split axis attack of mixed missiles.
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