The US Navy would only be about a year away from adding an anti-ship missile to some of its L-Class amphibious ships, which currently lack heavy weapons.

Arming these ships is big business. It’s no secret that the Navy struggles to maintain a firepower advantage over the Chinese Navy. Sticking missiles on amphibians is one way for the Americans to keep up and even stay ahead.

U.S. Marine Corps Major General Tracy King, Director of Expeditionary Warfare in the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, pitched the idea Friday in a meeting with reporters, according to Marine Energy Magazine.

“We have these magnificent, 600-foot-long, highly survivable LPD-17s,” said King, referring to the 13-class amphibious transport dock ship. “LPDs need the ability to reach out, defend themselves and sink another ship. “

King said he expected tests with a bolted anti-ship missile to last about a year. “We’re probably going to test a system from an L-class ship and let the fleet play with it, build the doctrine on how we’ll use it and to confirm or deny if it’s worth it, which we think. It is.”

It’s not that the Navy views large, slow-moving amphibians as replacements for frigates, destroyers, or cruisers. “It’s not from the point of view of their use as a strike platform,” King explained.

Yet an armed amphibian is better than an unarmed amphibian. “It is important that as many ships as possible be multi-mission,” said Eric Wertheim, naval expert and author of The combat fleets of the world. “We just don’t have enough assets to have single mission ships. ”

“It’s kind of like giving the cook a gun,” Wertheim said, “but that doesn’t mean you’re going to send the cook to the front lines. “

Marine anticipates a sharp drop in the years to come, by the number of missiles it will be able to deploy when the vintage cruisers and destroyers of the 1980s are decommissioned and smaller, less heavily armed frigates replace them.

In total, the Navy could have a few dozen LPD-17s and LX (R) – the latter are cheaper LPDs – by the 2030s. At present, these ships carry only light defensive armament. , including 30-millimeter cannons to repel enemy ships and a pair of launchers packing Rolling Airframe missiles for close-range air defense.

In naval combat, LPDs rely on escorting ships to control them. Adding an anti-ship missile to amphibians could allow them to contribute to a surface defensive battle. “It will greatly increase their survivability if the enemy is to honor this threat,” King said.

As an added bonus, many anti-ship missiles also have secondary ground attack capability. An armed LPD could provide precision fire support to its own embarked Marines, much as amphibious flotillas during World War II often included landing craft equipped with rockets and cannons.

The main candidate for a possible LPD missile requirement is the naval strike missile from the Norwegian company Kongsberg. Raytheon builds the gun for around $ 1 million under license in the United States.

The Stealth Subsonic NSM comes in a box launcher compatible with roughly any ship with enough space on its deck.

The GPS-guided missile can travel up to 100 miles and strike both ships and targets on land. It is very autonomous. You throw it in the general direction of the enemy forces. When it arrives in the target area, the missile uses its infrared seeker to move towards a target corresponding to an internal database.

The Navy is adding NSMs to its littoral combat ships in hopes of giving these lightly armed ships a chance to fight in wartime. King acknowledged that any effort to add NSMs to amphibians could interfere with the parallel effort to arm the fleet’s 35 LCS. “We are working with Raytheon and other partners to see if they can increase production,” he said.

If the LPD weaponry works, it could lead to a broader effort by the Navy to increase the firepower of ships that are currently lightly armed. “Imagine in the future that they could potentially add all kinds of weapons to all kinds of platforms,” Wertheim said.

He mentioned Raytheon’s SM-6, a long-range anti-aircraft missile that also has anti-ship and ground attack capabilities. Unlike the bolt-on NSM, the $ 5 million SM-6 requires a vertical launcher, the installation of which might require a cutout in a ship’s hull.

But the supersonic SM-6 is a much more powerful missile and can travel hundreds of kilometers. And it’s compatible with the Navy’s Cooperative Engagement System, in which ships and planes exchange sensor data so they can guide each other’s weapons.