So, out go the tanks and in come the missiles. The USAF had experience with Tomahawks (Ground Launched Cruise Missiles) in the 1980’s, although those were nuclear-armed and sent Europe into a tizzy:
“The Navy/Marine Corps Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System (NMESIS) and Long Range Fires (LRF) programs are the materiel solutions to meet
this capability. NMESIS is developing a Marine Corps system using the Naval Strike Missile to provide a ground based anti-access/area denial, anti-ship capability. The NMESIS effort will include the development, design, build, and testing of a Remotely Operated Ground Unit Expeditionary (ROGUE) Fires vehicle. ROGUE Fires is an unmanned ground vehicle based on a Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV) chassis with a mounted missile launcher system. The LRF effort is developing and fielding a ground-launched Tomahawk missile capability.”
I don’t think they are going with Tomahawk’s they are going to be using the The Naval Strike Missile (NSM) an anti-ship and land-attack missile developed by the Norwegian company Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace. The state-of-the-art design and use of composite materials is meant to give the missile sophisticated stealth capabilities.
The missile will weigh slightly more than 400 kg (880 lb) and have a range of more than 185 km (100 nm). Like its Penguin predecessor, NSM is able to fly over and around landmasses, travel in sea skim mode, and then make random manoeuvres in the terminal phase, making it harder to stop by enemy countermeasures.
The NSM is to be used by the U.S. Marine Corps as part of the Navy/Marine Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System (NMESIS), which places an NSM launcher unit on an unmanned JLTV-based mobile launch platform to enable the Marines to fire anti-ship missiles from land.
Interesting that there will be two mounted on what I assume is a remote controlled JLTV based launcher.
“The LRF effort is developing and fielding a ground-launched Tomahawk missile capability.”
According to the document, these will be Block V TACTOMs. If the USAF could manage it 40 years ago, the USMC shouldn’t have any issues using today’s technology.
What is the price of a Tomahawk now, I seem to recall they were like $100 mil, the way I read this the NSW was around $15 mil for 1 fire control system and 12 missile’s in 2018.
On 31 May 2018, the Navy officially selected the NSM to serve as the LCS’ OTH anti-ship weapon. The $14.8 million initial contract award to Raytheon calls for the delivery of Kongsberg-designed encanistered missiles loaded into launching mechanisms; and a single fire control suite,” and buys about a dozen missiles.
We are talking about Marines after all, cheaper toys might be a better fit.
1.) Marines are going to get on ships and then land on a beach to set up anti-ship missiles to shoot at the Chinese Navy.
2.) Once they’ve shot said missiles at said Chinese Navy they get back on their ship, and head to some new and exciting small island to rinse and repeat.
With this in mind, if a surface ship can access these islands to land Marines on, couldn’t the same surface ship launch anti-ship missiles without the need to waste time landing and recovering Marines?
If the argument is that the Marines can be left to set up and wait, what happens when they shoot their missiles at the Chinese Navy, and their ship out of there is nowhere to be found or can’t recover them?
Assuming a contested area of operations how is this employment of Marines and surface ships to transport them to shoot missiles from a beach going to be better than a Los Angeles class, Seawolf class, Ohio class, or Virginia class doing the same thing? Except with no need to surface, much less go into shallow waters near islands and land ground forces.
Sorry but this idea is pretty retarded to spend money on. I think more advanced SSN’s is a wiser investment if taking on the Chinese Navy is the mission.
With access to some added information about this… I’m a lot less sanguine about this.
It’s still fundamentally a strategic cost range asset, and given the age/capabilities/flight envelope/supportability aspects of actually fielding these in sufficient quantities, this just feels like a color of money swap on trying to actually try and get enough funding for the Seeker project that contracts went out for last November to actually arrive at fruition for proper ASM functionality.
For countering ground targets, the penetration capability of these just isn’t necessary when the Corps can drop other assets to any littoral area easier.
… and this is ignoring the prime kinda sharting the bed on a few key performance things for the current mainline TLAM systems.
As much as I’d personally benefit from this (and from reviving the air-dropped tomahawk capability for the air force side), that platform just doesn’t make financial sense against a near-peer adversary, and sure as hell doesn’t against anybody inferior
A Tomahawk weighs around 3,500 pounds with booster so some sort of crane will be needed to reload the launcher vehicle, unless they plan to shoot and scoot (back aboard ship). The NSM’s are smaller and lighter so those would seem to be easier to manage.
Not sure what the concept of employment would be - stockpile missiles on an island and deploy to remote sites to launch at targets within range?
Depending on what Block V variants the USMC gets, they can engage moving targets at sea.
SSN’s costs billions and take years to build, Navy Marine Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System (NMESIS) is going to only cost a few million and can be quickly acquired. I don’t know what the doctrine is going to be but the way I would do it is small teams delivered to multiple islands, ambush enemy ships, picked up if possible but if not destroy equipment and go to e and e. You could give them a RHI or pick them up with air assets or a sub once the heat is off, I kind of envision them as being like raider teams for taking out ships. Of course I’m not the USMC so who knows.
Uh if you can deliver to multiple islands via surface ship, that means there’s probably not ChiComs around to fling small anti-ship missiles at, because the area is not contested.
Plus you don’t get to send one landing craft capable ship with Marines on it to go do this. They’re going to have escorts. So you tie up naval assets to accomplish this.
If they have to E and E on a small island or in an archipelago, that’s a good way to run out of supplies, or get killed or captured if the ChiComs want to make an effort to eliminate the pesky missile launching teams.
I see this as almost like mines that are based on land, coast watchers with bite, or unsinkable frigates. No capital ships and escorts, this isn’t a re-hash of the island campaign in WWII- it is the next step. We didn’t go island by island in WWII, we skipped major strength concentrations and took what we needed to put bombs on Tokyo and choke off supplies. (Frankly, the Philippines shouldn’t have happened except for MacArthur’s ego.)
For once it seems the military isn’t asking for tens of billions of dollars in reasearch and development thrown into a black hole; that’s a change…
These assets also won’t be operating alone, they will be the low end to complement the high-end battle groups. These low end forces would also be attainable by the regions smaller forces, on their own territory. Vietnam ins’t going to be getting a deployable three carrier battle group.
One would think that it would be harder to sink an island than the same surface ship that landed the Marines. And if the Marines are cut off by superior forces, they’re in no worse spot than a surface ship in the same situation, probably better; I would assume that missile artillery units would have Infantry units deployed with them. At that point, they just dig in, and do their best to hold the island. At the very least, they can bog down enemy resources for the time required to root them out.
I can think of one island nation that could really use some highly mobile truck mounted easy to hide anti ship missile systems whether manned by US Marines or their own troops. Again it is really interesting to me that the launch vehicle is unmanned, in a high threat environment you could have the launcher pop up fire it’s two missiles and sacrifice itself with no threat to command and control.
Mack, I think that’s really the answer.
Despite my nagging suspicion that this will just be a cheaper money pit way of updating old Block IIIs coming back from refresh, that scenario you’ve laid out is actually fairly realistic and relevant
The more I think about this, and I didn’t even stay at a Holiday Inn Express recently, if the JLTV launcher would fit inside a container or a 18 wheel trailer you could play a shell game moving them around. If the balloon goes up have the doors pop open launcher roll the half mile or whatever to it’s firing position and launch.
This concept of long-range fires discounts the reason we have expeditionary Marines.
You still have to kill people. Light infantry can traverse slow-go and no-go terrain. Once you get to whatever objective you’re trying to reduce or destroy it still comes down to small arms fire and explosives killing humans – as the Russians are finding in Ukraine.
Relying on someone else (the Army or allies) to provide your artillery or armor support means them spreading their assets.
Risk management – a constant balance to counter most likely vice most dangerous enemy courses of action. The Russians underestimated Ukraine’s desire NOT to be Russian.
How do you stop a large powerful expansionist nation from invading a smaller nation with the intent of absorbing it? Tilt the cost/gain ratio towards the cost side. Weapons systems like this could act as a deterrent to conflict starting in the first place.
THAT is the basis for International Relations Theory.
Great Powers do what they want. Small nations endure what they must.
If you don’t want to be absorbed or exterminated you have a few choices, but the gist is to either Balance against your enemies (strengths against weaknesses), or Bandwagon with a bunch of allies.
For all intents (except armed friends bringing their armies) Ukraine is being supplied with arms in numbers they couldn’t possibly afford – because 1) the West promised them if they gave up their nukes they’d be supported, 2) they simply hadn’t joined NATO yet because Russia had bullied them, and 3) they were invaded by the bully Europe fears but most hadn’t put promised money into the alliance that was supposed to protect against the Bear.
If the plan is to pre-deploy these units and cache supplies all over the place in advance of conflict it might be workable. Once conflict starts though using surface units to ferry Marines around behind Chinese controlled areas or in contested areas is pretty damn risky.
If they’re digging in with a year’s worth of food and water plus ammo and missiles OK, that’s major ass pain to deal with for the Chinese. Forcing them to dedicate resources to dealing with a Marine anti-shipping operation, or avoiding the area which also benefits us.
