How Norway Is Building One of the World's Most Lethal Missiles (And It Could End Up on the F-35)

The article below is from the Telegraph, a UK paper.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/11/15/royal-navy-to-lose-anti-ship-missiles-and-be-left-only-with-guns/

To sum it up, the Royal Navy is taking their Harpoons out of service. The Navy is upset about this as it leaves them unable to compete with navies that have long range missiles. The article doesn’t say why the missiles are being removed from service so I’ll tell you. Navies continuously test their systems to verify they work. They probably fired a few and those missiles failed to properly function. So, why wouldn’t they just keep them in service? Because a weapon that doesn’t properly function can get you killed or kill you itself. Hardware that you can’t rely on is dangerous.

I spent an entire career building, testing and shipping new and refurbished hardware. Any complex system is on a test and maintenance schedule. Many are on an automatic refurbishment schedules. To refurbish a complex system can cost as much as it cost new. (Old systems sometimes get refurbished when it is actually cheaper to buy a new system because...accounting and politics.)

To understand why systems fail, I’ll take you back to the start of the Korean war. The Army had stored millions of dollars worth of equipment after World War II. They expected to take it out of mothballs, dust it off, and send it to Korea. But much of the equipment had failed during storage. They took it apart to see why and it wasn’t just one problem, it was dozens of problems. It turns out that complex systems have a finite usable life. The clock starts running when they ship from the plant and never stops until the system is taken out of service. Whether you use it or not, humidity, temperature changes, internal chemistry, vibration from riding in an airplane and the electromotive force between dissimilar metals are all working to destroy the system’s functions.

Because the article above was written by a reporter you don’t get much detail, but I can tell you the Navy submitted a cost proposal to refurbish their weapons and the government said no. The Navy’s priority is to be able to fight a war and the government’s priority is getting elected next cycle.

You can’t really compare a Harpoon to anything in your daily life. It is a dozen times more complex than, say your car or television. It has a massive warhead that is set off by signals from an electronic package. Now suppose something fails in that electronic package and inadvertently sends that signal. About twenty years ago a US ship in the Caribbean was running an exercise where they were simulating the firing of a Harpoon. Unbeknownst to them, something had failed in their systems. Suddenly they heard a whoosh! They looked at each other and then a sailor ran out of deck and there was the slowly dissipating cloud of exhaust. They never found the missile or where it hit. The Navy tries very hard not to do things like this, but they happen. As systems age they happen more frequently and they can have devastating consequences.

Several years ago, I had a stack of left-over cinder blocks. I piled them in a corner of the yard expecting I might use them some day. When that day came I discovered that several had cracked and a few had broken; just sitting there. The heat and cold had taken their toll. They aren’t nearly as complicated as a Harpoon.

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