That is very true, Sea Dart was designed to counter Soviet weapons systems that tended to use supersonic plunging missiles rather than sea skimmers, so for it’s intended role the emphasis on higher altitude longer range performance made sense. My complaint isn’t with Sea Dart per se (it was as good as any other AA missile of it’s era and probably better than most) but rather the economy decision to reduce costs with the Type 42 hull to the extent that it couldn’t take any additional major weapons and was built in the full knowledge that it’s close in AA defence was seriously defficient. Lack of surface-surface capability you can accept as part of the trade off to optimise a air defence vessel, but to build a air defence vessel with such a serious AA hole in it’s defence was crazy. The problem wasn’t that the RN was blind to the problem or ignored the threat of advanced sea skimmers, it was the treasury and politicians who were too tight fisted to pay for a decent hull. To build a ship, with an intended service life of 20-30 years that has already reached the limit of it’s capabilities when new is ridiculous. When the task force went South the Exocet threat was a major headache to all of the vessels in the transit South and all of the commanders were fully aware of just how exposed the vessels were to the threat.
Sea Cat was a very poor missile, there has always been a big debate as to whether replacing tri-axially stabilised, RPC 40mm mountings and equivalent with Sea Cat was actually an improvement or a degradation of AA capability, the old joke was that the only way Sea Cat would knock down an enemy target was if it crashed into the launcher 🙂
Of course at the time the Government were going to reduce the navy down to a glorified north atlantic asw force with the Americans providing all the serious AAW kit. Just look at the original speck for the type 23, no Sea Wolf at all with the Fort class providing air defence to several ships. I’m sure the MOD and politicians said you won’t be going up against anyone who has Sea Skimmers the Type 42 will do and the RN did what they always do: Shut up and Make do!
I talked to someone who served on a Amazon class ship during the Falklands and he told me the only decent air defence system they had on board was the Bofors 40mm, the Sea Cat was a waste of space in his opinion.
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