I always drew a corollary between torpedoes in WWII and ASCMs in the modern world. The IJN loved torpedoes and the USN preferred radar directed gunfire. The Soviets loved ASCMs and our SWOs loved ???. I'm guessing the answer to ??? was that CRUDES was there to protect the CVBG and the CVBG was the hammer because more recent CRUDES doesn't have the broadside weight of WWII CRUDES like the "machine gun cruiser" CLs.
According to VADN Henry C. Mustin, a Shoe, while being Commander, U.S. 2nd Fleet and NATO Striking Fleet Atlantic c. 1988, there was initially no SWO intention to answer those flying "long lances" with something offensively tactical. It was the USN Bubbleheads who tried to answer the challenge. Let me cite his "Oral History" a bit:
I remember Walt Locke was the Tomahawk guy—the original Tomahawk project, before it became a joint program. He was a rear admiral. The only people who were looking at the Tomahawk were the submariners. They were looking at it as an anti-ship weapon. We knew that there was no way in hell you were ever going to be able to target a ship 600 miles away, because we couldn’t target the Harpoon. You fire this thing out there and no matter what you do with the seeker, at some point you’re going to turn it on, and whatever it sees it’s going to attack first. So they had a whole scheme of targeting systems they called “outlaw shark.” We were saying the anti-ship version of the Tomahawk should be a third priority. The first priority should be the TLAM—C, conventional version of Tomahawk. Submariners didn’t really like that, because the warhead of the TLAM—C was a 1000-pound bomb. And in order to really contribute to anything you had to carry a lot of them. They didn’t have the real estate in the submarines to carry enough TLAM—Cs to make any difference in a conventional scenario. Which is one of the reasons why they’re pushing to get these Tridents reconfigured. So, as I said before, there was no support from any of the other unions for the Tomahawk, but we persevered.
Although further Mustin adopted the surface fleet Tomahawk tactic:
S
o we went out in Bill Peerenboom’s ship (a CGN), and took five ships to go down for this. We went down in electronic silence and along the coast. The carrier couldn’t find us. In the meantime we had sent a couple of submarines down, and they located the carrier. So they were keeping us informed of the carrier’s position and we were still in silence. The carrier air wing was searching all over the Atlantic Ocean and couldn’t find us, because we had very carefully gone in one of these merchant routes. When we reached Tomahawk range we fired not only on the submarine-reported position, but on electronic signals that we received from the carrier at long-range. We fired what we called six Tomahawks; then we rolled the dice and said: Okay, two of them hit. Then we found out what the carrier had been doing at that time, and it turned out that they’d had a bunch of airplanes on deck, and things like that.
When we got down there I went over and saw the admiral on the carrier, and I said, “Hey, here’s the way the exercise worked out, as I see it. We fired these simulated missiles, and rolled the dice. Here’s what we had for your position.”
He checked it, and said, “Hey, you had us.”
The first was the submariners and it makes them similar in ASuW to Russians to a degree. All these tricks with SSGNs carrying ASCMs could (and I think should) be boiled down to just one key issue: a targeting. Even if one has a huge satellite group or air recco assets, the SSGMs are to be inevitably hanging on a periscope antennaes just to get a targeting info for a hours, and thus they are prey for ASW aviation. That is why we "rolled our eyes" when the USN killed VSs as ASW assets and stripped VPs off primary ASW role. Placing the CSG ASW on 60R' shoulders only seems to be a huge challenge to cope with.
