US Navy’s new Top Gun missile makes aircraft carriers all but invulnerable to Chinese attack
Story by David Axe • 2h
In a surprise move last summer, the US Navy revealed a new and extremely powerful air-to-air missile – an air-launched version of the Raytheon SM-6, normally fired from a vertical launch silo aboard a warship but also compatible with ground-based launchers.
The radar-guided SM-6, redesignated the AIM-174B for air-to-air use, is a massive missile weighing nearly a ton and ranging at least 220 miles – if not farther. And it “will massively change the current attack-defence model of war at sea,” according to Weapons Magazine, a government-owned trade publication in China.
US Naval War College analyst Ian Easton helpfully translated and summarised the Chinese article.
Ranging more than twice as far as America’s next-best air-to-air missiles, the Raytheon AIM-120 Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile, the AIM-174B – which doesn’t yet have an official nickname – hugely expands the volume of air space that the US Navy’s carrier air wings and their F-18 Hornet fighters can control.
That, in turn, has the effect of pushing back the Chinese air force’s Xi’an H-6 bombers, and reducing the effectiveness of the bombers’ anti-ship missiles, which Beijing is largely counting on to damage or sink American carriers in the event of a major war in the western Pacific region. On such a mission, H-6 bombers each carry between four and six YJ-18 anti-ship missiles ranging as far as 340 miles.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/us-navy-s-new-top-gun-missile-makes-aircraft-carriers-all-but-invulnerable-to-chinese-attack/ar-AA1zZpm8?ocid=widgetonlockscreen&cvid=7705a07fff744ca1d28e65080236fc70&ei=34
