Exocet: The Flying Fish That Hit HMS Sheffield and MI6's Fake Arms Deals

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The Exocet, French for flying fish, was named by Jean Guillot, technical director at Nord Aviation, whose work is now part of MBDA. It flies at Mach 0.93 with a 165-kilogram warhead, using inertial guidance and then active radar homing, while skimming one to two meters above the sea. That keeps it below a ship's radar horizon until about six kilometers out, leaving defenders less than 20 seconds to react, and pushed navies toward automated close-in weapon systems such as Phalanx. In the 1982 Falklands War, Argentina fired six air-launched AM39 Exocets from French-built Super Étendard jets. On May 4, 1982, one struck the destroyer HMS Sheffield. According to the Royal Navy Board of Inquiry, the warhead failed to detonate, but burning rocket propellant started fires in the aluminum-rich ship; 20 crew died and the ship was lost.

On May 25, two Exocets aimed at a British frigate were decoyed by its chaff and then locked onto the converted cargo ship Atlantic Conveyor, killing 12 and sinking it with helicopters and supplies. On June 12, an MM38 taken off the destroyer ARA Seguí and fired from a makeshift trailer on land hit HMS Glamorgan, which had turned its stern toward the missile; it skidded off a coaming, blew up a Wessex helicopter in the hangar and killed 14, but the ship survived. MI6 agents posed as black market arms dealers to drain Argentine buyers' time and money, and British intelligence traced a $200 million guarantee from the Andean Lima Bank, a Banco Ambrosiano subsidiary, to Peru's central bank, leading France to halt a Peruvian order. On May 17, 1987, an Iraqi Falcon 50 hit USS Stark with two Exocets, killing 37; its Phalanx was on standby and its chaff was not armed.

• The name traces to the Greek exokoitos, "sleeping out," for fish thought to rest on the shore.
• British planners judged that an Exocet hit on either carrier, HMS Invincible or HMS Hermes, would cost them the ability to retake the Falklands.
• The Block 3 replaced the solid rocket with a turbojet, raising range from about 70 kilometers to more than 200, with GPS waypoints for indirect approaches.
• The Block 3c adds a Thales digital radio frequency seeker that varies its waveforms to resist jamming and can tell an aircraft carrier from a decoy.
• A 1980s Exocet cost roughly $200,000, yet it could cripple a multibillion-dollar warship.