Originally Posted by
SLXOwft
The lack of an ASuW missile capability comes from governmental foot dragging over the replacement of Harpoon facing an ever diminishing stocks of viable missiles and short term support contracts. Diamond inherited Harpoon when the last T22s were decommission but they were removed not long ago in line with the 2023 OSD. NSM is clearly only going to be added to each vessel when the work fits in with her operational schedule. In any case an ASUW capability is a nice to have for a Class of vessel whose primary function is AAW, particularly in support of a CSG with other vessels and aircraft providing the main ASuW element as per the US CSG with which Diamond is currently operating.
My understanding is Type 45 isn't scheduled to get FCASW (for which capability gap NSM is an interim fix, for FFs at least) until the 2030s, if at all - I have only seen it publically declared for T26 and Typhoon. Surely a Sylver compatible FCASW version would make more sense than retaining the canister launched NSM. But who knows given which ever defence spending phobic monkeys the British public puts in charge of the asylum next.
There are two things here - lack of an ASuW missile and lack of a land attack missile. That NSM is potentially capable of both (as was SLAM-ER back in the day) is neitehr here nor there. The decision lies in the capability management sphere, where - understandably - post Cold War, the intention was to get efficiencies by removing duplicate capabilities. You can trace it back to the creation of the DEC in MB in 98/99 or thereabouts. The land attack element was to be provided by SSN-launched TLAM with air-launched CASOM (Storm Shadow) as an alternative.
The anti-ship element (known as FASGW) was intended to provide a weapon to meet the criteria of the time - specifically tight RoE precluding pure radar-guidance without prior ID and a belief that sinking large ships was someone else's (Astute/Spearfish) problem. FASGW ended up being one of the longest procurement phases ever.
Its only recently that people have realised we might have to sink major units again.......