Top Tester Tells Navy To Test Carrier, Destroyer Defenses With Real Missiles & Explosions

You’d expect the nation’s top weapons tester to be a stickler about testing. But there’s “rigorous testing” and then there’s “let’s shoot cruise missiles at you and see what happens.”

It’s not that the Navy is wimpy about testing. The service conducts “full-ship shock trials” like the USS Roosevelt test pictured above, where it sets off a huge explosion next to a ship with a test crew aboard, as in this video of the destroyer USS Winston Churchill:



The Pentagon’s famously tough Director of Operational Test and Evaluation wants to Navy to speed up such shock testing on its new aircraft carrier, the cutting-edge and high-cost USS Gerald Ford.

Read more