Where is the US military test-firing a new anti-ship missile during a joint exercise with the Philippines? in the Philippine Sea. What is its purpose? The purpose is to intimidate China and see how good my new anti-ship missiles are.
Let's start with you about this new anti-ship missile of the United States, who launched this new anti-ship missile of the United States? It was the U.S. Marine Corps, and the U.S. Marine Corps fired an anti-ship missile from a helicopter and sank a moving training ship. Let's think about it, if a helicopter carries an anti-ship missile, can the anti-ship missile still be big? It's certainly not big, which means that this is a small anti-ship missile.
That's right, this anti-ship missile is called the AGM-179 Joint Air-to-Surface Missile, then this missile is mainly aimed at high-value, stationary, mobile and relocatable land and sea targets. Since it is a helicopter mount, then it has a limited warhead. So if this missile is proposed, you may not be familiar with it, if you mention another missile, do you know what it is? It is actually an improved version of the "Hellfire" missile.
So what is "Hellfire"? Friends, think about it, the "Hellfire" is actually an American anti-tank missile, and the missile's range is less than 10 kilometers, so on the basis of its improvement, the range is about 20 kilometers, so it is a relatively short-range anti-ship missile. Of course, it can not only be anti-ship, but also continue to be anti-armor and anti-other fixed targets. As far as the United States is concerned, the purpose of improving the "Hellfire" is to make it a general-purpose missile, which can not only be anti-ship, but also anti-armor, and can also strike at other targets.
Then we need to emphasize with you that the performance of this missile has indeed been improved to a certain extent. You are like the "Hellfire" missile, including its improved model using semi-active laser guidance, as well as millimeter-wave radar guidance, then on the basis of the original infrared guidance, in order to improve the accuracy of strikes, then it is a three-mode guidance method. However, this missile seems to have a relatively high strike accuracy, but in fact its warhead is relatively small, so it is more difficult to hit larger sea surface targets, and it has no problem dealing with some fortifications and some small targets.
Another core problem is that the flight speed of this missile is at high subsonic speed, not to achieve hypersonic flight, which greatly shortens its applicability. Therefore, we can see that the United States tested this anti-ship missile in the Philippine Sea in order to intimidate China, which is completely redundant. Because although this kind of missile has only recently been installed by the United States, this kind of missile is okay if it is against some small and medium-sized countries, but if it wants to confront China and Russia, I think it is powerless. So this so-called test, then it is only to scare those countries that do not have military capabilities.