The Navy’s LCS missile woes

The Navy’s littoral combat ships were supposed to bring the era of missile warfare into its next generation. It was the perfect scheme: The Navy would sit back and relax while the Army did all the work developing its planned Non Line Of Sight missiles, a “box of rockets” that soldiers — and later, sailors — could use to bring precise and overwhelming force against tomorrow’s hard-to-find-but-easy-to-kill bad guys.

In the computer-animated “simulations” of yesteryear, a helicopter or cargo plane drops off an NLOS crate for a team of Army special operators deep in Indian Country. Let’s say the soldiers spot some bad guys fleeing in a pickup truck.

No time to call in the dumb ol’ Air Force for CAS — instead, the soldiers push some buttons and launch a missile from their own crate, which sweeps down to deliver righteous punishment. Our guys stay under cover and they’re free to continue maneuvering forward and bringing the pain, either with additional NLOS strikes or their own weapons.

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