Comment by throwaway2037 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway2037 | Hacker News Reader

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Normally, I don't like this kind of "source please" reply.

However, I feel that CIWS is mostly defensive security theatre. How often are do they actually work in the real world? The number of attacks on vessels carrying CIWS are so small. As a result, CIWS hardly get any real world practice. Events would be studied by military and manuf., then software updates made. As a counterpoint: Think how many cruise missiles have been fired in the last 50 years -- lots(!). There are plenty of case studies for military and manuf. to improve software. (I assume this is also how anti-missile systems are improved, like the US Patriot system.)

FYI about this ship (Moskva):

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_cruiser_Moskva
    Says CIWS system is: AK-360

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AK-630
    See section "Service history" for some *highly* speculative writing!

This destroyer destroyed a few missiles fired on it and it has CIWS

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Mason_(DDG-87)#Attacks_off...

Nice reference. Your example is more about anti-missile missiles. I was talking more about the machine gun plus radar setup. I find it hard to believe these work very well in combat situations.

>Normally, I don't like this kind of "source please" reply.

Why not? We are allowed to ask for the sources to claims that are not obvious or easily verifiable, like the ones regarding weapons systems of a secretive country.

The sources posted are pretty much the only we even can have. Naturally for these kind of weapons systems we essentially only have the public information, that includes western weapons systems.

And all of them naturally boast that they can defend against well, everything. Only when something is actually tested in the field we can see how well it works.

Hence Russians have an incentive to deny that it was due to weakness of their CIWS. Or, perhaps more probably, an incentive to say to Putin that they didn't corrupt all the maintenance money and it was just an accident.

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