The Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) Surface Warfare (SUW) module determining the best mix of surface-to-surface and air-to-surface missiles

Abstract

Asymmetric threats pose increasing challenges to the United States Navy in littoral environments. To address the Navy's need for a new platform to serve in this area, the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) was designed and put into service. What still has yet to be determined is what surface-to-surface capability the LCS will have as well as what air-tosurface capability the LCS helicopter/unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) will have. This study uses freely available data to build a simulation utilizing an agent-based modeling platform known as MANA. The simulation is exercised over a broad range of different weapon systems types with their capabilities ranged across the spectrum of possibilities based on their effectiveness as well as potential difficulties in targeting small boat threats. Using linear regression and partition trees, an analysis is performed on the resulting dataset to address the research question. The results show that the NLOS system is the best surface-to-surface missile system for the LCS as long as the expected rate of fire is obtained. The best air-tosurface missile system is either APKWS or LOGIR, depending on which can obtain a rate of fire of one missile every nine seconds or faster. Lastly, the rate of fire has been shown to be the most important factor in determining the effectiveness of the different missiles.