| MAY 2017 |^39
SEA
POWERCREATING NEW REFERENCES IN DEFENSE I WWW.NEXTER-GROUP.COM®
The 20MM
cannon
superior
firepower
lands Navy, the system had to evolve to
deal with new surface threats, primar-
ily swarms of small boats attempting to
attack a vessel. Today’s surface threats
are “faster and more manoeuvrable,”
Ms. Keppe added. Such tactics were em-
ployed by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard’s
Navy (RGN) in the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq
War, during which the RGN would em-
ploy Boghammar Marin speedboats
equipped with heavy machine guns and
rocket launchers to mount surprise at-
tacks against ships in the Persian Gulf
believed to be supporting Iraqi com-
merce during the so-called ‘Tanker War.’
Moreover, the Sea Tigers maritime wing
of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam
insurgent organisation active during
the Sri Lankan civil war of 1983 to 2009
used small boats to mount suicide attacks
against the Sri Lankan Navy.
Definition
The definition of a CIWS is perhaps not
so clear cut as it might first appear, said
Eric Wertheim, a naval expert and author
of the US Naval Institute’s Combat Fleets
of the World. There was a question mark
over the dividing line between small
arms and CIWS: for example, guns in the
12.7mm realm could be used against such
threats as small craft or helicopters: “The
most effective layered defence is achieved
through a continuum that typically be-
gins with small arms up to the CIWS
guns at the centre, then moves farther out
to point defence missiles, then to shorter
range and medium range missiles, all the
way up to the longer range surface-to-air
missiles,” he told AMR.
Some systems can be used in multiple,
different roles, including CIWS. For ex-
ample, the 35mm Rheinmetall/Oerlikon
Millennium Gun could be used for mul-
tiple roles on different ships, said Craig
McLoughlin, senior vice-president of naval
systems at the company. It could be used
in a CIWS role, he said, though it could
also be the main gun for constabulary or
patrol vessels, a secondary armament for
a corvette or an offshore patrol vessel, or
as a dedicated self-defence gun for frigates
and larger vessels including auxiliaries or
amphibious assault ships. The company
sees the gun as having a wide ranging,
self-defence capability, protecting ships ef-fectively against anti-ship missiles at short
ranges but also out to ranges as far as 1.3
nautical miles (2.5 kilometres).
The launch customer for the Millenni-
um Gun was the Søværnet (Royal Danish
Navy), with the first systems delivered in
2006, Mr. McLoughlin said, while there
are a number of other customers, such as
the Armada Bolivariana de Venezuela (Ven-
ezuelan Navy). Mr. McLoughlin said Rhe-
inmetall had adopted a “future-oriented”
approach with the Millennium Gun, ask-
ing: “how (do) you protect the ship with
a small number of systems against a large
number of threats?” This underscored
the importance of CIWS having a mul-
tirole approach, he continued. The com-
pany has designed the Millennium Gun
to be flexible in terms of integration, Mr.
McLoughlin added: “We are fire control
and combat system agnostic; use ours or
bring your own.”
Moreover, he pointed to a number of
ways in which technology has evolved in
recent years regarding CIWS. He high-
lighted sensor performance and the ad-
vances driven by phased array radar tech-
nology (see below). There is a need to detect,