by The RIM-174 Standard Missile-6, or SM-6 for short, may be the US military’s most versatile missile. It is usually fired from a vertical launch cell on a US Navy warship, but recently it has made a second appearance under the wing of a fighter jet: the SM-6 could be flat. bigger versatile
America may be solving the wrong problem here, though. There is an argument to be made that the military should be spending every available dollar buying additional SM-6s, rather than making more ships and planes capable of dispatching the limited number currently in the US arsenal.
“If the Navy doesn’t have enough missiles to sustain a fight in the western Pacific, the number of vertical launch system cells or long-range missile-capable aircraft available is meaningless,” Jack Montgomery, US Navy. student, wrote in a prize-winning essay.
The SM-6, built by the US firm Raytheon, is a development of the older SM-2, which remains the world’s primary free surface-to-air missile. Thousands of SM-2s shot down hundreds of American and allied warships.
To produce the SM-6 starting in the early 2000s, Raytheon and the US Navy took the airframe of the SM-2, added the newer SM-3 rocket booster, plugged into the longer-range AMRAAM seeker. air-go. -air missile and also placed GPS.
The military can therefore target missiles and aircraft in the air, ships at sea and targets on land. It is one of the few true omnirole missiles in the American arsenal – and US forces are finding more and more new applications for it.
At first, SM-6s were only armed with warships – and only engaged with airborne targets. The Navy expanded the missile’s target to include ships at sea and targets on land. Recently, the US Army adopted the missile – and stood new SM-6-armed missile batteries whose main mission is attacking targets on land from land.
Now it looks like the SM-6 is going into the air. In 2021, an F/A-18F fighter belonging to a US Navy test squadron was photographed carrying an inert SM-6 – missing its first stage rocket booster – over a California test range.
The 2021 test appears to have supported Raytheon and the US Navy’s effort to develop a new long-range air-to-air missile. Three years later in April, another US Navy F/A-18 was seen over the same test range in California carrying a possible live SM-6.
Raytheon and the US Navy are apparently still developing the SM-6 for a possible airborne launch. The benefits are clear. The 3,300-pound SM-6 ranges as far as 230 miles – probably more than twice as far as the US Navy’s current long-range air-to-air missile, the AMRAAM.
As an anti-ship or land attack missile, the SM-6 too it has advantages over the air munitions of the US Navy. With a top speed of Mach-3.5, it is significantly faster than the current Harpoon anti-ship missile and the Joint Air-to-Surface Fixed Missile land attack weapon, both of which are subsonic. A faster missile is harder to intercept.
The SM-6 is also desirable because it is thought to have at least some ability to engage hypersonic weapons, which are often considered indefensible against. This would be an important mission regardless of which SM-6 was launched: but the US Navy would be more than happy to have SM-6s on its defense fighters as well as its escort destroyers, in the case of Chinese or Russian hypersonics to be fired by a US aircraft carrier.
Perhaps most important of all, the SM-6 switches modes with the press of a few buttons. An F/A-18 fighter towing a fleet of SM-6s could wait to see the targets in the air, at sea or on land – and attack any or all of them with the same munitions. No need to land and touch again.
If there is a problem with the SM-6, it is that the high-tech missile is expensive. Each 22-foot round costs more than $4 million – and that weighs on the production rate. In the first 15 or so years of supply, the US navy built up a stockpile of about a thousand SM-6s. More recently, it has been receiving new missiles at a rate of 125 per year.
This is too few missiles. US Navy destroyers and submarines have thousands of missile cells. If the US fleet also armed hundreds of F/A-18s with SM-6s, it would create a far greater demand for missiles than its limited inventory – and anemic production rate – could satisfy.
It is conceivable that, in a major war with China, American ships and planes – to say nothing of the US Army’s batteries on the ground – would destroy every SM-6 ever produced in a matter of days.
Arguably, the US Navy’s top priority should not be to add launch platforms to its best missile but, instead, to add missiles to existing launchers. “A high-level conflict will require more precision-guided munitions,” Montgomery wrote. “If China decides to invade Taiwan before the end of the decade, the Navy will not have enough stocks of high-value munitions at the start of the conflict. Time is of the essence.”
