Surface Ship Torpedo Defense Cancelled
The DOT&E 2018 Annual Report reveals that the Navy has decided to cancel the hard-kill torpedo defense system program (Surface Ship Torpedo Defense – SSTD).
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In September 2018, the Navy suspended its efforts to develop the SSTD system. The Navy plans to restore all carriers to their normal configurations during maintenance availabilities between FY19 and FY23. DOT&E removed the SSTD system from DOT&E oversight. (1)
The SSTD, you’ll recall, was the result of a Fifth Fleet Urgent Operational Needs request after the sinking of the South Korean ROKS Cheonan in Mar 2010. Prototype units were to be installed for deployment on carriers in a rapid fielding procedure concurrent with development and testing. In the event, systems were installed on three carriers over a several year period (so much for urgent, huh?). DOT&E has a good writeup on the overall system for those interested (2).
Despite investing $760M in development efforts, the system was unable to perform acceptably. (3) This leaves the Navy with the same torpedo defense capability gap they had ten years ago! What do you call an urgent need that, several years later, still hasn’t been filled? Is it now a super duper urgent need? But, I digress …
It’s not all that surprising that the technology failed - most new technologies do. They require years or decades of development. The Navy should have been working on this all along. It’s not as if torpedoes magically appeared as a threat just ten years ago. Torpedoes have been a threat since ships first took to the seas (all right, not quite that long but almost). Further, the principle threat, the Soviet wake homing torpedo has been around since the 1960’s. Why the Navy hadn’t been working on an active torpedo defense system for decades is a mystery and reflects the Navy’s utter lack of focus on combat.
We eagerly invest $15B on a new carrier but neglect things like torpedo defense and weapon elevators, to name just a couple of items. As the DOT&E reports have pointed out for many years, the Navy refuses to even develop a realistic torpedo threat surrogate for testing!
The threat still exists. What now, Navy?
(1)DOT&E 2018 Annual Report, p. 164
(3)The Drive website, Joseph Trevithick, 5-Feb-2019,
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/26347/the-navy-is-ripping-out-underperforming-anti-torpedo-torpedoes-from-its-supercarriers
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