Maritime air defence firing tactics

A typical firing doctrine is the Shoot-Look-Shoot tactic. In this tactic, the defence launches a salvo of interceptors against the targets (Shoot), assesses the outcomes of the engagements (Shoot-Look), and launches another salvo (Shoot-Look-Shoot) if time and the inventory of interceptors permit. In the open literature, it is often assumed that the targets are identical. This is not always true as targets come in with different ranges, speeds, sizes, cross sections etc. In this paper, we consider two types of targets. Each type of target has a different number engagement opportunities due to their ranges and speeds. Through the use of dynamic programming, a genetic algorithm, and a recursive generating function, we determine the probability of raid annihilation (the probability of neutralizing all of the targets) for two different Shoot-Look-Shoot (SLS) tactics. The first SLS tactic is based on variable size salvos and maximizes the probability of raid annihilation (PRA) for heterogeneous targets. The second SLS tactic is based on fixed-size salvos and is robust as it is independent of the number and types of targets. Theoretical results are validated through some computer simulations.