U.S. Carrier Group Tactics - Anti-air Warfare Operations

Anti-air Warfare Operations

The central weapon in modern naval combat is the missile. This can be delivered from surface, subsurface or air units. With missile speeds ranging up to Mach 4 or higher, engagement time may be only seconds.

The key to successful Anti-air warfare (AAW) is to destroy the launching platform before it fires, thus removing a number of missile threats in one go. This is not always possible so a fleet's AAW resources need to be balanced between the outer and inner air battles.

There are several limitations to Surface-to-Air missiles (SAMs). Modern missiles are commonly semi-active homing. They need the firing unit to actively illuminate the target with a missile fire-control director throughout the flight. If a guiding director shuts down then the missiles still in flight will self-destruct. So the number of intercepts a unit can simultaneously prosecute is limited by the number of directors possessed. The use of directors exposes the firing unit to counterattack.

Clearly this is not a good situation and the US Navy has spent vast sums overcoming this limitation. The result is the Aegis combat system — phased-array radar and time-sharing technologies combined with missiles that have an inertial flight mode, allowing intercepts to be spaced more closely together. However, this is a partial solution at best, as the most numerous classes of ships with the Aegis combat system only have three or four illuminators, so only three or four missiles can be engaged at once.