But its pointless as the missile has to be commanded to target. This is an extremely poor way to attack a ship that likely will launch fire & forget missiles at you to direct you away from them and so lock is lost.

Right, being a SARH missile, the AIM-7 doesn't lock onto anything by itself; the firing aircraft's radar locks on and illuminates the target. But you can pretty much fire an AIM-7 at anything you can see on radar. There's a well documented Sparrow vs surface vessels friendly fire incident that happened during the Vietnam war: http://www.gunplot.net/vietnam/hobartvietnam.html F-4 Phantoms attacked the HMAS Hobart and other ships, after getting reports of NVA helicopter activity in the area. The F-4s mistook the radar returns from the ships for slow moving helicopters, and engaged them with Sparrows. As far as it goes, a Sparrow would do about as much damage to a ship as a HARM or the like; you would almost certainly not sink a ship of any size with one, but you could do a lot of damage to a ship's sensors that way. In a pinch this would be a decent way to disable FPB's or other small boats without good SAM protection. But I agree, you have to be in a pretty permissive environment for SARH air to surface attacks any more. By definition if you can illuminate the target, it can illuminate you, and unlike the ship you have to be flying toward it to paint it, whereas its SAM directors will give it wide angle coverage.

AIM-7s didn't get lots of direct hits. Proximity fuses did most of the work. A, what?, 40 pound warhead going off near a ship will do what? Scare them back to port? Would the proximity fuse be set off by proximity to the surface?

Well, if you check out that link I pasted, you can see a couple of photos that show what an AIM-7 can do to a Charles F Adams class DDG. Not fatal damage, but it did take several systems out of action. AIM-7Es had a 65 lb warhead, later versions 86 or 88 lbs. Something like that flying at over Mach 2 hitting a ship will still do some damage, even if it only explodes near the ship rather than striking it directly. Again, not saying this is a realistic way to attack modern ships, but it can be done.

It probably can, although the fire control software controlling the ship's illuminator is probably not ideally designed to prosecute Surface-to-surface engagement. As a matter of fact, they are probably written explicitly to not mistake surface targets as SAM engagement opportunities under normal circumstances.

That said, using SAMs against ships -- or more likely boats -- is not new. The Standard SM-1/2 have a secondary surface engagement capability.But that is a BIG SAM with a rather substantive 135 lb warhead. The RIM-116 Rolling Airframe Missile is also designed with a secondary capability against boats. This is basically a sidewinder booster with the Stinger's new imaging IR seeker and a passive RF seeker. The RAM is typically fired from a 21-cell box launcher and it'll be like taking a homing RPG if you get hit by one. It'll be like throwing stones at an APC if used against a destroyer or the like, but I won't want to on one of those Iranian insect boats with outboards and have one blow up two feet away.

During the first Gulf War two Canadian CF-18's had an encounter with some Iraqi patrol boats.  The pilots first tried to sink the boats with their aim-7 Sparrows, but failed.  They then strafed and damaged the boats with 20mm canon.  The Americans eventually finished the job with A-6's.

Can you give a link or reference? I'd like t' know more.

To TrustButVerify.
The story about the CF-18's were in the Canadian newspapers and there was video footage on the CBC and CTV.  You can try the Ottawa Citizen newspaper for back issues.  Then you could try CBC.ca ( Warning...this is a mega leftist TV station. ) zorgon