THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 25, 1996 TAG: 9602250070
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A11 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Short : 34 lines
The Navy says it has demonstrated for the first time a warship's potential to shoot down a sea-skimming cruise missile before the ship's own defensive radar can even detect the approaching missile.
Cmdr. Greg Cruze said this was shown in an experiment late last month in Hawaii in which four target cruise missiles were shot down in four attempts.
A key to the project, dubbed ``Mountain Top,'' was the use of a communications network that enabled the frigate Lake Erie to fire on the targets based on tracking signals provided by a radar about 30 miles away from the frigate, Cruze and other Navy officials told reporters Wednesday.
The radar that fed information to the Pearl Harbor-based frigate was on Kokee mountain on the island of Kauai at an elevation of 3,800 feet. This radar eventually will be installed in an aircraft that will perform the same task of feeding data to ships, Cruze said.
The Navy said this was an important advance in antimissile defense because it would enable ships to defend themselves - and potentially land sites as well - from hostile missiles at greater distances than is possible today.
The Navy's existing antimissile system, now used worldwide, is effective only if the ship's own radar can detect and track the target. It cannot perform the kind of data transfers that were tested in the Hawaii experiment. by CNB