The new system does not take into account how long it takes to make a breakthrough system work. Meyer knew, because he had been in the business of curing earlier breakthrough systems. Aegis is in effect a reproach to current defense procurement policy. That is probably the most important thing about the fact of its enormous success. Naval missile development, both in the United States and abroad, seems to carry one great lesson: Breakthroughs don’t work. Spiral development does.

All NATO navies faced the same sort of saturation Soviet threat that had led the U.S. Navy to develop Aegis. In the 1980s, none of them had any air defense system that could deal with it. When NATO navies discussed a project for a common future NATO frigate, the U.S. Navy saw an opportunity to inspire allies either to adopt Aegis or to develop comparable technology. The project ultimately collapsed, but before that it had inspired the development of what is now the Evolved Sea Sparrow Missile – which, like Standard, is adapted to an Aegis control system. That means that both missiles can accept intermittent command guidance via an uplink controlled via the Aegis tactical picture. The NATO project spread the idea that the best way to build a future air defense system was to base it on a tactical picture carried in the system’s computer. The European PAAMS system (French, Italian, and British) reflects exactly this idea, the key difference from Aegis being that its missile is actively rather than semi-actively guided (that PAAMS combines an entirely new actively guided missile with a new command and control system probably explains its lengthy gestation). Unlike Aegis, PAAMS does not fully integrate the ship’s command system and its air defense picture, and that may make for slower reaction. The Dutch and German navies fielded their own new system (employing the Standard Missile), incorporating their own new electronically scanned, multipurpose radar. Presumably the overall architecture of the system reflects Aegis ideas, but again the air defense system and the ship’s combat direction system are linked but separate.

When the Cold War ended, so did the threat of massed Soviet bombers launching their missiles at a U.S. or NATO fleet. However, the U.S. Navy faced a new problem. It expected to operate closer to hostile coasts, which might hide missile boats or mobile missile launchers. Anti-ship missiles would likely pop up without warning. Because its tactical picture was so closely integrated with its fire control system, Aegis offered a much shorter reaction time than any alternative. That was one reason the U.S. Navy discarded so many of its older missile ships so quickly after the end of the Cold War: it no longer considered them survivable under the new conditions.

By that time there was another new threat: ballistic missiles operated by many Third World countries. Initially, the U.S. Navy had little interest in the problem, but in fact it was more serious for the Navy than for the other services operating in forward areas. Naval support of warfare ashore generally required fixed facilities – which made good ballistic missile targets. Advocates of naval ballistic missile defense pointed to a disquieting incident during the 1991 Gulf War, when an Iraqi Scud splashed into the water not far from the single container pier in Jeddah through which most of the support for the ground campaign flowed. Had the Scud carried a chemical warhead, it could have made the pier – and the port – unusable.

Examination of the tapes generated by Aegis radars during the war showed that they had often tracked Scuds. During the Cold War, the U.S. Ballistic Missile Defense Organization had developed small homing interceptors specifically to destroy incoming ballistic missile warheads. A study showed that exactly such an interceptor could be mated with the existing Standard Missile. A new booster could propel this combination beyond the Earth’s atmosphere. The result was designated SM-3, SM-2 having been the Aegis version of the Standard Missile.

The key was that Aegis was built not around a particular radar but around a tactical picture, which could be fed by sources other than the ship’s own SPY-1 radar. That was the deeper meaning of the training picture computer. The system, moreover, could command a missile to go to a designated point in space. SM-3 uses small thrusters to adjust its course above the atmosphere, and it incorporates GPS so that it knows where it is; but it is clearly an extension of the existing system.

Tests showed that SM-3 worked –indeed, that it worked much more reliably than the breakthrough land-based interceptors developed at the same time. It worked so well that it was chosen as the missile of the new land-based ballistic missile defense system now being put into place to protect NATO countries.

This story was first published in Defense: Winter 2013 Edition.