You Spot, I Shoot: Aegis Ships Share Data To Destroy Cruise Missiles

Imagine you’re a sniper. Imagine the bad guys are coming — but you can’t see them yet. Imagine your spotter can see them — but only because he’s miles away from where you are, with a better view. Now imagine that when you put your eye to your gunsights, you see the view through his. You fire. You hit the target. It goes down.

Replace the sniper and spotter in this scenario with a pair of 9,000-ton warships, replace the bad guys with incoming anti-ship cruise missiles, and replace your sniper rifle with a Raytheon SM-6 Standard Missile: Now you’ve got what actually happened in a recent Navy test whose results were announced today.

For the first time, one Navy ship shot down a simulated cruise missile — two of them in a row, actually — that its own radars couldn’t see, relying entirely on data relayed from another vessel. (In this case, the shooter was the Aegis cruiser Chancellorsville, the spotter was the Aegis destroyer Sampson).

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