Noah Shachtman notes that the The U.S. Navy can’t stop China’s most sophisticated anti-ship missile — and won’t even start testing a defense until 2014. From Bloomberg News:
The Sizzler starts at subsonic speeds. Within 10 nautical miles of its target, a rocket-propelled warhead separates and accelerates to three times the speed of sound, flying no more than 10 meters (33 feet) above sea level. On final approach, the missile ‘has the potential to perform very high defensive maneuvers,’ including sharp-angled dodges, the Office of Naval Intelligence said in a manual on worldwide maritime threats.
The “Sizzler” missile sounds remarkably… Robotech. Anyway, this evasive maneuvering poses a problem:
The Navy doesn’t have a test target that can mimic how the Sizzler flies. They haven’t even “picked a contractor to develop the test target,” Capaccio notes. Industry proposals for building the target missile were received in February and a contract valued at about $107 million will be awarded by Oct. 1 for a 54-month development phase and first fielding by 2014.”