Cruise missile that truns into Torpedo?

The real trick is to get past the missile defense. CWIS is not a reliable missile stopper anyways, if you can fire enough weapons to overwhelm the missiles you might as well overwhelm the CWIS by firing a few more.

So to be effective you need to dive in the water outside the effective intercept radius of the SAMs. That is a long swim.

What I think would be a real scary antiship weapon is basically air deployable semisubmersible robots. Once you have the enemy fleet located, you map out a “kill box” slightly larger than the range of enemy SAMS. Your bombers rapidly encircle the box, drop the robots and and point them toward the center of the box. Each robot then zig-zag into the perimeter scanning with radar at snorkel. When it sees something it fires a torpedo at it and radio back the contact.

Payne Harrison’s novel, Thunder of Erebus describes a hypothical land grab between US and Soviets of Antartica due to some exotic minerals being found there.

The Soviets deployed a secret anti carrier weapon for the express purpose of killing carriers much like what phrozenflame described.

The weapon (Zimordork or something) has three stages. The first stage is ballistic launch from a refitted Delta SSBN. Initial target acquistion from ROSATs. I supposed it could be used because the carriers was anticipated to be around a certain area at McMurdo Sound. The missile will transition to cruise missile phase on its way to the carrier and dive down into the sea as a torpedo on the final terminal phase to avoid CIWs. (Torpedo is vertical rising with tandem warheads)

So phrozenflame, is this the inspiration of your idea?

The Replacement for ASROC was supposed to be the Sea Lance, but it was cancelled when tactical nukes were withdrawn from ships as improvements in silencing soviet subs meant a nuke warhead became requirements to get a kill rather than an option of last resort. I would expect these days that most modern subs will be rather immune from such weapons due to their quietness meaning that active sonar will be the only way to detect them at extended enough range to warrant such a long range weapon.

Er, I think the whole point is that it will go “wet” before it gets into CWIS range……..

all the ones Harry mentioned are anti-sub, but I wonder what will happen if they drop next to ship ? prolly a easy target for any decent CIWS as it floats down.

Is there any kind of anti-ship missile..which flies over water and when it get near the target, it goes underwater and hit the target??

Its a good idea though, that way it would get to target quickly, yet in its final phases avoid CWIS….

U’ve been reading Payne Harrison’s novels?

Nothing dives into the ocean as such but the ASROC, RPK-2 Viyoga, 91RTE2 / 91RE1 Klub carry Torpedo payloads that are parachute-deployed onto the target area.