As Australia fields air warfare destroyers equipped with the upgraded Baseline 9 Aegis combat system, Lockheed Martin is developing a version of its familiar Patriot surface to air missile which could one day replace SM-2 missiles.
The company isn’t specifically pitching the Patriot as a replacement for any particular missile.
Lockheed Martin’s vice-president of naval systems Tom Copeman said the company had been working to integrate the Patriot PAC-3-MSE missile with the Aegis combat system for a number of years.
“We have determined that the integration of these two very successful programs of record would provide for the US Navy an extremely powerful integrated air and missile defence capability that they currently do not have in the numbers that they need, fill some capacity and capability gaps for them,” he told reporters at the Indo-Pacific maritime exposition in Sydney.
The US Navy will conduct a land-based test firing later this year and if that’s successful, they will proceed to sea trials.
Patriot is a mature and widely used surface to air missile developed in the 1980s and first field in the 1991 Iraq war. It has since been widely exported and steadily updated.
Copeman said the latest Missile Segment Enhanced (MSE) version has been in full rate production since 2017, with 500 produced each year at the plant in Arkansas, ramping up to 550 by end of year.
Lockheed Martin is looking to further lift production to 650 missiles per year by the end of 2026.
PAC-3-MSE is a hit to kill missile which Lockheed says totally obliterates targets, a development spurred by experience in 1991 when Iraqi SCUD missiles were successfully engaged but not destroyed enough to stop warheads reaching their targets.
Copeman said these could be launched from a standard Mark 41 vertical launch system.
“This missile is designed to take on the most challenging manoeuvring targets that you can imagine. It has been tested effectively against a range from supersonic anti-ship cruise missiles to tactical ballistic missiles,” he said.
PAC-3-SME isn’t a replacement for the full range of navy missiles. It can’t hit exo-atmospheric targets like SM-3 or the diversity of targets like SM-6.
“With the exception of SM-6 it is significantly more effective than every other surface to air missile in any missile in any military in the world today,” Copeman said.
That would appear to include SM-2, the standard long-range surface to air missile aboard Australian warships.
Could Australia be interested?
“You would have to ask the Royal Australian Navy,” he said.
“We have never pitched it as a replacement for anything. We have just said here is the capability of this missile against these threats. It could replace anything and everything if they wanted it to."
“The US Navy has definitively expressed a lot of interest and I think they are trying to find budget to get it in their program. It is a phenomenally capable surface to air missile.”