The Navy’s Standard Missile is, as the bland name says, the Navy’s standard missile to defend the fleet against incoming strikes by enemy aircraft and anti-ship missiles. (Attacking enemy ships and ground targets is done by other missiles altogether). In recent years, though, the Raytheon-made missile has branched out. The standard Standard, the SM-2, is a straightforward fleet-defense weapon, with some capability to intercept targets over the land and even hit enemy ships. But the military is developing a long-range, high-altitude SM-3 variant to intercept ballistic missiles as they coast through space.
Then there’s the SM-6, first issued to the fleet last fall. “It’s the latest evolution of the Standard Missile family,” said Navy Cdr. Sidney Hodgson, the deputy program manager for the Standard series. (SM-4 and SM-5 never saw service). “It doesn’t replace the SM-2,” which will stay in service alongside the SM-6, he emphasized, but “it gives you increased firepower, it gives you extended range.”
To save costs, the Standard Missile Six is an unholy hybrid of the long-range rocket motor from the SM-3, the agile aerodynamic body of the SM-2, and the nose of an AMRAAM air-to-air missile, normally carried by fighter planes. It’s the borrowed AMRAAM components in particular that let the SM-6 pick out tricky targets like a cruise missile maneuvering at low altitude and low speed over land. Even in the desert, the land is never as smooth and flat as the sea, so a low-flying target can hide itself amidst the “ground clutter” of natural features — hills, rocks, buildings — that also show up on radar.
“What we were attempting to show was, [given] something that was subsonic, very low, could we discriminate and engage it?” said Raytheon’s senior program director for SM-6, Mike Campisi. “It was wonderful to see.”
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