USN Tests Griffin For Littorial
To give the lightly armed LCS, the remaining 179-foot Cyclone class coastal patrol craft, and the new 85-foot MK VI boats, the US Navy is testing the lightweight Griffin missile. This economical ($45,000 a pop, which is cheap as far as this type of stuff goes) little bottle rocket is just the thing for splashing a small boat (such as a Iranian Boghammer) or a quiet sea-side hut full of pirates. Small in profile, it can be used in an 8-pack launcher that is all above deck, fitting in any area that can accept a Mk38 sized mount.
Cheap and effective, the Griffin is smaller even than the vaunted Hellfire missile. And they could be coming to a LCS near you.
Designed for small UAVs to be used in precision strikes against buildings and vehicles, the AGM-176 Griffin has a proven track record in air-to-ground use. The 45-pound missile uses components of the FGM-148 Javelin and the AIM-9X Sidewinder. It can send a 13-pound warhead guided by laser, GPS, or INS out to 12-miles. The Navy is at least using a proven missile for once. In its surfaced launched version it can reach out to 5500-meters (3.5-miles), which is still well past the range of heavy machine guns and RPGs which are the probable weapons of any small boats that the Griffin would defend against.
One has been mounted on the USS Monsoon (PC-4) for trials and seems to work just fine so far.
$45,000 may be cheap for a guided missile type weapon, but it is still a lot per shot, and a lot of space is taken up by the rocket body it self. These projects seem to go ahead and the real revolution in naval ordinance, the rail gun seems to be on a slow bell. With the rail gun a ship, large or small can carry more “arrows in its quiver”, with none of the risks of black powder or rocket fuel. The price per shot should be minuscule compared to this weapon. The lesson of the BISMARK is that a bunch of cheap platforms can gang up on the best and latest and if nothing else, eventually the “death star” runs out of things to throw and the swarm moves in for the kill. The rail gun gives both the swarm, and the death stars lots more arrows per dollar spent, less vulnerability, cheaper throw weight. The Guardian is helpful, but there are a lot of circumstances where the man in tactical command would rather have 50 rounds of rail gun projectiles and the means to fire them than 8 to 16 of these things at $45,000 a shot.
You can mount anything up to four C-701 on the back of most Iranian PCI to turn it into a FAC-M type craft and the Iranian navy now has 53 such vessels in service.
The missile having a range of 15-20km (that’s 9-12nm) and a warhead of 60lbs looks like a Japanese ASM-1/Type-80 AShM.
By comparison, BGM-176 Griffin is a 5.6km (3.5nm) ranged /tank killer/ derived weapon. Which means you are putting a 43lb missile up to defend an 800 million dollar /corvette/ while craft which the IRGC can build a three of and get change back from a million are capable of carrying 800lbs worth of missiles, any one of which will put an LCS out of operation if it hits because these are built to Class-0 safety standards.
The 57mm and 30mm guns are hopeless as CIWS against saturation volleys of these weapons because they have lousy stabilization and only optical gunlay without the hyperrapid radar range and steer direction of the bullet stream to handle even 1-2 such AShM, let alone a volley from 4 or more boats.
RAM thus becomes a single layer defense because the Persian Gulf CAVU environment is fully compatible with the two principle (DTV and TI) alternative seeker heads and neither of these are bothered by RFCM or SRBOC/Decoys.
It is stupid beyond words to waste deckspace installing an exposed launcher with all it’s hydraulics when you can get twice the munition depth in a Mk.48/.56 VLS and everything is below decks where neither weather nor threat attack is a major concern _to the entire mount_ and topweight vs. limited coverage arc is also not a problem.
The idea that these LCS multi-mission platforms will have ‘modular mission systems’ that can be RORO’d is made ridiculously farcical when you have to admit that even the tiniest self-defense missile is so volume critical that you prefer to scab it on in a remote launcher.
You will be lucky if you see these Fast Attack Craft on the radar horizon before they shoot and scoot back over LOS and anything less than an SSM moded ESSM is going to have no hope at all of catching them.
Using surround sound attack geometries and sheer speed, these craft will flatly outrun any UAV helicopter you use to roll back that horizon and without weapons onboard the helo will not be able to do anything about them anway.
Given the RG-8 is cancelled, the LCS doesn’t even have an airborne aperture to work with.which means Griffin is a stupid weapon, even if the threat is limited to HMG and MRL/RCL because _nobody can lase_, out to maximum range to support it when the ship’s onboard optical directors are already fully engaged supporting the gun packages.
Supporting LINKS-
The Threat
http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/6904/1894/1600/c-701_2.jpg
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/708/nasr1cruisemissile04.jpg/
CSIS PG Balance
http://csis.org/files/publication/121010_Iran_Gulf%20Military_Balance.pdf
This Ain’t Yer Granpappy’s Boghammar
http://defenceforumindia.com/forum/naval-warfare/42815-irgc-commander-irans-speedboats-capable-launching-cruise-missiles.html