US Navy conducts first demonstration firing of NSM from a destroyer

The Naval Surface Warfare Center Port Hueneme Division (NSWC PHD) has conducted the first demonstration firing of a naval strike missile (NSM) from a U.S. Navy destroyer.

Working under a compressed timeline, NSWC PHD and its partners installed the first Over-the-Horizon (OTH) Weapon System on a destroyer, USS Fitzgerald (DDG 62), in time for it to launch an NSM during RIMPAC.

Other major players in the effort included Program Executive Office Integrated Warfare Systems (PEO IWS) 3H, Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division (NAWCWD) China Lake, General Dynamics Mission Systems and Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace AS.

“This was a high-visibility requirement for the Navy,” said Eric Romero, customer advocate for OTH with NSWC PHD in Port Hueneme, California.

OTH is a long-range surface-to-surface warfare system that launches NSMs, which are anti-ship guided missiles. The navy has added the system to about a dozen Independence-variant littoral combat ships over the past five years.

In late September 2023, the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations challenged PEO IWS, which in turn tasked NSWC PHD, with installing an OTH on Arleigh Burke-class destroyer USS Fitzgerald in time to demonstrate it at RIMPAC 2024. That left only about nine months before the biennial international fleet exercise.

NSWC PHD employees took on various projects to pull off the endeavor at this accelerated pace, from developing ship installation drawings to getting cybersecurity approval to installing and testing the equipment.

The overall effort encompassed nearly 20 organizations, including five program offices, four warfare centers and a dozen external entities, according to Todd Jenkins, platform integration lead with NSWC PHD in San Diego.

Typically, this type of first-of-class installation takes at least two years, according to Robert “Tony” Honeycutt, Alteration Installation Team manager at NSWC PHD’s Virginia Beach Detachment in Virginia. A key factor in speeding up the process was proposing the OTH as a temporary change to USS Fitzgerald, which reduced the requirements for documentation and drawings compared to a permanent change.

The team installed the OTH on USS Fitzgerald at Naval Base San Diego from mid-March to late May. The main components of the system are the launcher and an operator interface console. To make it compatible with the destroyer, the system also required a navigation adapter.

After installing the OTH, NSWC PHD trained crew members and helped them test the system while underway.

In Hawaii for RIMPAC in July, USS Fitzgerald participated with other ships and aircraft in a sinking exercise, known as a SINKEX. The target was a decommissioned amphibious ship about 50 nautical miles off the coast of Kauai.

With NSWC PHD team members monitoring remotely, USS Fitzgerald launched its first NSM from the OTH. The NSM successfully searched the target area, and detected and prosecuted the target.

While the new weapon system is still authorized as a temporary installation on USS Fitzgerald, the team is working to secure approval for it to stay on the ship indefinitely.