The CHARC: Covert High-speed Attack and Reconnaissance Craft

The CHARC is designed to provide a lethal response for some of the emerging littoral threats facing large Navy vessels including suicide speedboats packed with explosives, small high-speed boat "swarm attacks" and diesel-electric submarines. With similar offensive capabilities to that of an AH-1W Super Cobra helicopter crammed onto a high-speed surface platform, the CHARC is small, fast and stealthy and can attack on a moment's notice using an array of Hellfire missiles, 20-millimeter guns, 40-millimeter grenade launchers and torpedoes. Like the AH-1W Super Cobra, a crew of two control the craft from a forward cockpit.

Lockheed Martin's proposed CHARC is a Small Waterplane Area Twin Hull (SWATH) design that offers extreme stability, even in high sea states.

Like its namesake (the CHARC is pronounced "shark"), it has plenty of bite, being armed to the teeth.

Indeed, it has many strengths and helicopter-like characteristics in its design and weapons assortment but differs from a helicopter in three important ways:

1 - it floats, thus enabling it to remain in an area for a long time,

2 - it has a very low signature so it's difficult to detect, track or shoot with most weapons

3 - it travels at extremely high speed on, rather than above the water.

Accordingly, it is able to loiter, patrol and attack in shallow littoral waters and it has the ability to sit low in the water for long periods and then "pop-up and dash" to suspected threats when speed is needed with a top speed of 60 knots.

An interesting amalgamation of many Lockheed Martin advanced technologies, the CHARC operates from a larger mother ship such as an amphibious support ship or possibly the new Littoral Combat Ship and responds quickly to changing threats as it supports an assortment of weapon and/or sensor mission modules that can be changed out in a few hours. It also provides limited mine-hunting capability for the detection and destruction of mines it encounters in shallow water.

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