then I'll be wrong
I quote a recent study claiming "The current layered defensive AAW approach puts surface combatants on the wrong end of weapon and cost exchanges."
Suggesting, well, I don't want to misquote them, so I just clipped out this picture:
"A key barrier to implementing this new AAW scheme is cultural. Today's surface combatant commanders prefer defenses that can engage incoming missiles at the same approximate range." etc.
Well, they can call it whatever they want. And a layered defense doctrine is NOT cultural. It is pragmatic and reflective of the realities of todays, and future threats.
The current layered defense engages missile attacking our ships out to well over 100 miles away from the ship. This buys the ship and its defenses TIME. Time to launch multiple missiles at targets that are missed in the outer layers. It also allows a certain percentage of missiles to be intercepted at each "layer" thereby reducing the threat as it approaches. it is built to defeat large attacks of many missiles form numerous directions because it can reduce those numbers early on.
A single layer will not do this. There is not a single missile that can do what the various missiles the US and others have in their inventories can do. The ralities of the physics associated with getting some missiles very quickly out to a hundred plus misle for an intercept, while other have to much more quickly intercept do not lend themselves to a single missile at this time.
We have a defense that takes into account Ballistic Missiles and the ability to intercept them up to 400 nm away from the ship (and testing others that will increase that to over 1000 miles).
We have a version of the Standard Missile that does that, but that same missile ihas two other versions capable of intercepting other anti-ship missiles at ranges from 200+ miles down to 20 miles or so.
We then have an ESSM missile that overlaps the Standard missile envelope out to 30+ miles and down to a few miles.
We have a Rolling Air Frame missile that overlaps the ESSM envelope out to 6+ miles.
We have a CIWS gun system that intercepts missiles out to 3 miles or so.
If they want to call that "one layer," they can knock themselves out.
But we do not have, and will not soon (or ever IMHO) have a missile that can engage all of those targets out to all of those ranges. There are differences in the design of each of these weapons that optimize them for the ranges they are engaging.
Now...we add Rail Guns and Lasers to that mix. First, they do not have nearly the ranges to participate in the longer ranges spoken of. Right now they will however provide very significant improvements and complimentary coverage in the ranges out to and less than ten miles.
They should be added...and they will be added because of their capabilities.
So, the US Navy, which has no peer in this level of defense, has developed a system to engage and defeat the anti-ship missile threat. The people designing it and doing it have a lot of experience, and they are very smart in missile design, and in the realities of the threats and vulnerabilities that we face..
It is always good to have think tanks throwing new ideas and thoughts into the mix...but the idea for a single layer in this context is simply semantics in the light of today's threat. There is no one missile now, or in the foreseeable future that will be adequate for all of those threats. And it would be foolish to cede any one (or more) of those areas in the hopes of a single missile/weapon type stopping all threats in a single layer.
That may not always be the case...but for right now and the foreseeable future it is.
