What is the actual feasibility of protecting surface ships? An important question because everyone has sea skimming anti-ship missiles. They're based on an old Soviet design (Kh-35). The missiles involved weren't even all that extraordinary. Apparently naval defensive systems - even with the depth of Moskva, which was festooned with anti-missile defenses - are not capable of protecting vessels under all conditions.Įvery case can be endlessly Monday morning quarterbacked, but it appears to me that if your navies defensive systems are not fully automated, continuously available or compromised by tracking limitations, including those induced by tunnel vision-ed crews, weather or any other conceivable condition, then you risk having your capital ships blown apart by a relatively inexpensive bit of ordinance that can be launched from hundreds of kilometers away using a variety of platforms. The Georgians actually scored a missile hit on the very same Moskva in 2008. The USS Stark got nailed by Iraqi Exocets. Exocets punished the UK in the Falklands. There's just a lot of unknown variables here. Personally speaking, I would have increased the number of Neptune missiles until two missiles struck the ship in the simulation. But maybe it gives us at least an idea of what the crew was thinking and/or not thinking. Of course, just playing around with assumptions probably won't get us to the truth of the matter. But what if it was 30-seconds? 60-seconds? 120-seconds? How long do we give the "crew" to not see the missiles?Ī second experiment is then run: what if the RADAR is off? It looks like the CWIS detects the missiles, but its too late: the CWIS can only disable one missile before the second one strikes the ship.
The OODA-loop originally assumes a response time of 15-seconds. Of course, this isn't what happened in reality.įrom there, the blogpost doubles the OODA loop: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act, making the ship's crew less-and-less competent until the missiles hit. With the base assumptions, the Moskva detects both missiles and destroys them long before they're anywhere close to a threat.
What this blogpost does, is start with the base assumptions of "Command Modern Operations", a military-simulator from MatrixGames, as well as the assumption of 2x Neptunes fired + 1x Drone nearby the ship.