The Influence of History

The County-class Unlike most navies, the Royal Navy's first guided missile ships were not conversions of existing ships. Instead, they were the eight purpose-built  County -class destroyers, which entered service beginning in 1962. Measuring 158 meters in length, these ships were much larger than the proceeding 120-meter Daring -class gun destroyers and were commonly referred to as "DLG" after the American hull code for large missile ships like the contemporary Farragut -class frigates . Further, rather than relying on American missiles as was done by most NATO navies, the British chose to build the County -class around the domestic Sea Slug surface-to-air missile - a weapon that unfortunately lived up to its underwhelming name. A beam riding missile with a range of 25 kilometers and a top speed of Mach 1.5 (many sources state Sea Slug was subsonic, this is incorrect and likely a misreading of the fact that it could only engage subsonic targets), Sea Slug was comparable...

The Marine Nationale has a somewhat mixed history with guided missile ships. It obtained its first such ship back to 1962, the same year as the Royal Navy. Further, France has domestically designed and produced two generations of naval surface to air missiles. However, every class of French guided missile ships was cut short for budgetary reasons, resulting in a perpetually undersized fleet, and none of these ships has every fired a missile in anger, leaving their actual combat effectiveness open to question. Surcouf-class The first French guided missile ships were conversions of the  Surcouf -class escorteurs d'escadre. Originally armed with a heavy battery of six 5" and six 57mm guns, the twelve ships of the Surcouf -class were the first French destroyers built after WWII and entered service 1955-1957. While France already had an indigenous naval missile program, the United States offered to supply a number of Tartar missile systems free of charge. Four ships were selected ...