US Marines Want Missiles To Sink Ships From Shores, And They Want Them Fast

[F-22Raptor]

WASHINGTON The Marine Corps has kicked off a rapid development program to begin firing long range anti-ship missiles from shore-based ground vehicles in an effort to add more punch to the Navy’s growing anti-ship capabilities, which are aimed squarely at Chinese and Russian advances.

Dubbed the Navy Marine Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System — that’s NEMSIS to you — the program has completed its design phase. The Marines are looking at Lockheed Martin’s Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM), Raytheon’s Naval Strike Missile, and Boeing’s Harpoon for the system.

The program kicked off last year with a request for information (RFI), after which companies signed OTA agreements with the service in September. Final proposals were submitted in December.

“The Marine Corps has been looking for a shore-based capability to meet PACOM demands,” Lockheed’s Scott Craig told me Wednesday. “The Army is looking at this too but probably on a different timeline — the Marine Corps wants to get after this pretty quickly.”

The Corps is looking at three different vehicles to launch the missiles — the M142 HIMARS which is already equipped to fire rockets, and two large, heavy-duty trucks, the Medium Tactical Vehicle Replacement truck, and the Logistic Vehicle System Replacement.

Craig said the Marines are looking for a mobile unit “that can shoot and move very rapidly. They’ve done the engineering analysis. They’ll start building prototypes in March, and test by the Spring of 2020.”

He added that, from a Lockheed perspective at least, “there’s some software we install in the vehicle and we use the same mission planning system that we use for surface launch, as well. We really take all of that previous effort we’ve developed over the past several years and adapt it to a ground vehicle.”

In 2017, the Marines fired the HIMARS system from the deck of the USS Essex during the Dawn Blitz exercise, marking the first time the self-contained, vehicle-launched rocket system has been fired from an amphibious ship.

The Marine push comes as the Navy is also doubling down on its ability to hit enemy ships at distance. Late last year, the Navy moved out on a program to arm its Los Angeles-class attack submarines with ship-killer missiles for the first time in decades, using an updated model of the decades-old Harpoon.

https://breakingdefense.com/2019/01...nk-ships-from-shores-and-they-want-them-fast/