Supersonic anti-ship missiles – not very stealthy!

 Supersonic anti-ship missiles – not very stealthy!

The advantage of a ship with a low radar signature is that it is less visible to anti-ship missiles that typically have active radar homing during the terminal phase. There are other missiles that use infrared homing, so a low infrared signature is important as well.

A more advanced missile also can cheat the ship’s electronic signature, for example, the JSM mentioned above which has an RF sensor under development in Australia.

As mentioned earlier, ships rely on a close-in weapons system (CIWS) to destroy incoming missiles. The supersonic missiles give the CIWS very little time to react before it hits the ship. There is cur-rent controversy since Russia and China have supersonic anti-ship cruise missiles and the United States and allies only have relatively few in service.

There are several reasons for this. Faster missiles tend to fly at higher altitudes where the air is thinner, making them visible from a greater distance as compared to a sea-skimming sub-sonic missile.

A missile flying at 10m above the surface can be detected at 31km with a radar 20m above the surface, but a Russian Kh-32 missile with a speed of approximately Mach 4.1 flies at 40,500m altitude and could theoretically be detected at a range of 845km away. This means longer-range anti-missile missiles could en-gage it before coming into range of the CIWS.

So a less speed, lower flying missiles are only detectable much later than a faster, higher-flying ones. Therefore, faster missiles are not necessarily better.