Bocs ez egy hosszú írás angolul, de sok kérdésre választ adhat, Steve Jones a Királyi Haditengerészet volt fegyvermérnöke írta(sajnos nem tudom linkelni) :
SPEAR3, last I heard, isnt in full rate production yet. Actual unit cost would be speculative if available at all in that case.
It is stated as having an antiship capability. That is insofar as it can hit a moving target. This is not a big missile though so any concept of huge impacts sending targeted cruisers to the bottom are not on the cards.
My view is that SPEAR3 represents a fantastic antiship capability though. This despite its small size and limited destructive power. In fact very few antiship missiles will actually send a substantial warship to the bottom. It being a very hackneyed line that you sink ships by letting water in the bottom….not by letting air in at the top.
What SPEAR3 will provide is an actual, practically useful, application of the ‘saturation’ approach many techno-hopefuls try to predict for small UAV swarms. SPEAR3 will be deployed 8 per F-35 with full internal carry. A fourship of F-35s will, then, be able to launch up to 32 individual weapons from 70km or so away.
SPEAR3 will also be fully passive in terminal phase so there is nothing to cue the target ships ESM systems that an attack is in progress. The SPEAR round itself is also pretty small and compact. It wont have a huge RF cross section. Most importantly though it may force the opposition to be active with a high-datarate horizon scan radar to guard against it. That makes the opposition much easier to find and target in the first place.
Bottom line though is that SPEAR may be slow and pack a modest warhead, but, it will be hard to spot, hard to counter with soft-kill and will be able to be launched in big enough numbers that hard-kill will have a challenge getting all of them in time. Even if the SPEAR effect is only analagous, perhaps, to a 5″ shell impact and if only a dozen weapons out of 32 launched survive the target ships hard-kill inner-layer defences thats still enough damage to put a sizeable modern warship out of action or open it up for a follow-on strike with Enhanced Paveway etc.
Now we’re getting strike-length Mk41 in the T26 fleet I’d be very interested to see if a LORA-style TBM could be used as a boost stage for a clutch of 4 or so SPEAR3’s. Could be a fascinating approach to time critical strikes, shore and sea, at long range.
