Nothing that shows anything worthwhile.

News of the attack was quickly disseminated by Hezbollah’s television station Al Manar, and the world was left to wonder if Israel’s vaunted military was, in fact, quite vulnerable to Iran’s increasingly sophisticated missile systems. Well, it turns out that the failure was not the ship’s, but the crew’s.

Defense News reported this week on an Israeli investigation into the attack. It seems that the Israelis can fault an “electronic warfare systems officer, who switched active defense systems into standbye mode without informing the ship’s commander.” The INS Hanit was armed with the Israeli-made Barak ship point missile defense system, seen below, which, according to DN, has “demonstrated an intercept capability of more than 95 percent in thousands of simulation and dozens of live-fire tests in Israel and abroad.”
http://www.weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/2007/01/

A hot little number. Makes you wonder what is being cooked up that we won’t get know about untill the next major conflict.

Just a word mate, im sure nobody was confused!;)

Might confuse it with a sub …. :diablo:

Since VL Mica uses the same launch tube as VL Sea Wolf, one could fairly easily plug that in, which would give Type 23 the option of a self defence missile sharing the same RF seekerhead as Aster 15/30, while adding the option of an IR seekerhead. BOth these being fire-and-forget, would be in improvement IMHO over Sea Wolf only (i.e. use a mix of, say, 12 Sea Wolf + 10 IR Mica + 10 RF Mica?)

“the SHar F/A-2s were offered..but like I said in the previous post, they were offered NEUTERED. no Blue Vixen radar and no AMRAAMs. which is the only selling point for the F/A-2 anyway. other than that, whats the point in buying an airframe that has major shortcomings in other areas like payload and range ?”

How hard would it be to stick in an Israeli radar and equip them with Python and Derby. Hardly a reason, IMHO.

What’s the difference between ESM and ECM?

Electronics Support Measures: the passive detection of enemy electromagnetic (EM) emissions.

Electronic Counter-Measures covers all methods used to deny targeting information to an enemy. Offensive ECM is usually jamming to prevent the accurate detection and identification of incoming strikes until the jamming unit is destroyed. Chaff is also used to confuse AAW operations by creating radar decoys. Defensive ECM also uses chaff as well as soids, blip enhancement and jamming of missile terminal homers.

Second try

Narrow??, i think that will apply more to your reasoning as i have no idea what you can do with 1 operational frigate at any time in the middle of the ocean?? protect Belgian interests? May i remind you we are a very small country with only 65 km of coast, no colonies or offshore land.

I know, I live next door. And as you know, we went from 2 S, 8 M’s and 4 LCF to just 2 M’s and 4 LCF. And we do have overseas interests (Antilles).
Point is, Belgium operates as part of NATO, and so as part of larger forces than she can field herself. See also what the Danes do.

Maybe we should hunt for enemy subs in the passific or indian ocean?
Times have changed for most small EU contries, the cold war is over, there are more pressing matters to achieve then blue water ops. With new, fast ships we could we far more effective in countering terorism, finding illegal shipping, guarding the environment by co- operating with other federal services like economic affairs, customs, health and safety, borderguard, etc…

For those tasks, there are much more cost-effective solutions than Visby.
See Italy’s Commandante class (NUMC) and “Cassiopea 2” or “Costellazioni 2” class (NUPA)

Havind no helicopter aboard is a downside to the visby, but as i said, visby was a example, there are other designs out there. In the event of a lack of organic helicopter i might add that it can easily come from shore when needed in a belgian scenario.

Back to narrow….

You might wanne think about teh future of teh belgian navy as a whole because at the molent with a dwelling budget for defense, it’s existence is about to become a formality, A costs that has very little to offer in teh traditional navy thinking style.

That’s why smaller NATO countries should cooperate more closely. Either on co-development (Canada, Germany, Netherlands > APAR ; Spain, Netherlands > LPD, AOR ; Belgium, Netherlands and non-NATO France > tripartite MH’s) or role specialization, or streamlined co-purchase.