Ping.
It may be old, but it’s still deadly...................
Its time to realize that in this modern stealthy, digital technological era anything, virtually anything, that floats can be precisely located and sunk in a wide variety of ways. The era of big surface capital ships is over. Hopefully the “battleship” admirals will come to terms with this new reality. It is simply unethical to crew a large carrier with 5,000 brave young people and send it into harms way against even a moderately sophisticated technologically competent opponent.
I saw this a few days ago on the FB site Tin Can Sailors. The old Torpedomen had a field day with it.The claim is that the object shown in the picture is actually a certain torpedo and not a Harpoon missile. It is not as an egregious mistake as a U.S. Navy site that referred to the port side of a ship as the left side.
Looks like a Mk 48 Torpedo in the first picture, not a Harpoon.
That blew up real good.
Prayers for those in the Silent Service.
If the U.S. wants a replacement they would do well to join with the British and French on the Perseus. Range of over 300 kilometers, Mach 5 speed, decent sized warhead. Joining in would probably shave years off the development time and give the U.S. a hypersonic weapon quicker than starting from scratch.
They never stopped the airwing delivered version fired from F/A-18’s. Back around 1987 if I remember correctly a test fire of the Harpoon in the Indian Ocean ended up hitting an Indian freighter that was spying on the missile test. All shipping was warned to avoid the area. The Harpoon will lock onto the largest vessel and when the freighter got to close the Harpoon locked on and hit the ships wheel house killing the captain. The missile’s warhead was not armed and the impact and unspent rocket fuel destroyed the bridge of the ship.