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Originally Posted by BadassHo
their missile locations will be knocked out first. and we have good anti-missile chain guns on our ships and a row smaller vessels dedicated to anti-missile warfare.
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You know, no one is really sure how effective anti-missile systems will be in combat. Anti-missile systems may be one of the most untested combat systems this side of post-WW2-torpedos.
We really don't have much to point at, but what we do have to point at is troubling. The only matchup of a cruise missile vs. an AEGIS cruiser was in the Faulklands and the AEGIS cruiser had all their shit all turned off like idiots and got blasted. A little more contemporary you have the patriot missile batteries of 1991 which did poorly despite media coverage to the contrary. An unknown bug in the targeting system that happened when you left the computers on too long was the culprit. In 2003 we have the most modern missle-shoot-down exchange in which the Iraqi military shot 11 missiles at coalition troops and 7 of them where shot down by upgraded patriot batteries and missiles.
Advanced cruise missiles are a lot harder to shoot down than the stuff the Iraqi military was lobbing at us at the opening stages of the Iraq war and we only got about 60% of those missiles. Obviously we're dealing with different missile systems entirely here so you can't point to the patriot batteries and say, "Well obviously this is how the Navy's entirely and completely different system is going to perform" but given that we don't have much to go on, it's pretty analogous.
But most troubling is that when congress asks the Navy about exactly how much of a threat "carrier killer" cruise missiles like the Klub are... they don't get much of an answer. Now that can either mean two things. It could mean that we have some kind of great defence that we're just keeping secret from the enemy so they don't learn how to defeat our defences. Or, we do not have any kind of a reliable defence against a weapon that can be fired 300km away, skim the sea surface to avoid detection, and then blast a 2nd stage rocket that closes the last 8-killometers to the target in 20 seconds.
Personally, I think the threat of anti-ship cruise missiles is huge from any military that posesses them.