Thats gonna leave a mark…
In the old Regan-era 600-ship Navy, the Tomahawk cruise missile was a be-all/do-all. Besides the land attack (TLAM) versions we know and love today, there were also tactical nuclear and anti-shipping versions fielded. Big Blue was so in love with these bad boys that they started to put them on everything from destroyers to subs and even retrofitted to cruisers. In fact, those of you who are battlewagon lovers, will recall that when the Iowas came back for their last hurrah in the mid-1980s, they carried 32 Tomahawks in 4-cell armored box launchers to help give them an effective combat radius far in excess of their 16-inch big sticks.
Well, post-Cold War the anti-ship version (TASM) and the nuclear tipped model were retrofitted to carry normal conventional warheads and reclassified as good old TLAMs.
Now, the Navy is doing t he reverse and testing an anti-ship capability for the Tomahawk Block IV TLAM.
“An unclassified video of the test, obtained by USNI News, shows the missile launch from guided missile destroyer USS Kidd (DDG-100), fly for an unspecified amount of time and punch a hole through a shipping container on a moving ship target and skip across the ocean.”
Roll that beautiful bean footage:
