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Originally Posted by MBot
The reason I came up with the topic was that I read trough one of my books again, and again realised how heavily the USN depends on the Harpoon as the primary anti-ship weapon for both ships and aircraft. I just find it surprising, as the Harpoon which was initialy designed to give martime patrol aircraft a weapon to quickly engage surfaced SSG/SSGN, was the backbone in defeating the soviet fleet. For a navy that always tried to get the best equipment possible, I have the impression they were quicker statisfied regarding ASM. Was it good enough to do the job? Most likely. But for my untrained eye it doesn't look like much overkill.
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I don't really see it the same way, as a dependency. We have many different weapons systems for different missions and envelopes. The air-launched Harpoon is our primary stand-off weapon. As such, that makes it our principal weapon against fleets armed with long and medium range ASCMs and defended by capable area-defense SAMs. Such a weapon would be a necessity against SA-N-6 armed SAGs, but Russia had very few of those (a few Slavas, Kirovs, and a Kara used for testing scattered across four fleets).
Ships armed with medium or short range SAM systems (the bulk of the Soviet fleet) could be engaged from standoff ranges with Walleyes, Skippers, and Maverick-Fs in addition to Harpoons. And against lighter craft without significant air defenses, ordinary LGBs and dumb bombs can be used.
And that's just weapons from aircraft.
Bring ships into the picture, and they have the TASM for longer range engagement, Harpoons for medium range, and 5" guns, SMs, and Seasparrows for knife fights/mop-ups.
So, what you call a dependency I call having the right weapon for the job. A lot would have been riding on the AGM-84/-88/Prowler combination early on, but it that didn't work out, you still have several "Plan Bs"... TASMs, low altitude airstikes using medium-range weapons (thus, you end up trying out radar guided, laser guided and TV/IIR guided weapons,
something has to work), submarines, and finally, shipboard Harpoons again. So if it turned out that our jamming didn't work and the Russian's soft/hard kill capability could defeat an alpha strike (unlikely, as we saw in 1991, our technology and tactics tended to prevail overwhelmningly over Soviet hardware and tactics), we'd just switch to a Plan B and probably have to live with a higher loss rate than we'd have had if Plan A worked as we'd hoped. That's not an attractive proposition, but the USSR was a superpower. It's not supposed to be easy to beat them.