Posted by Ken Waldron on December 6, 2024, 11:18 pm
Lots to chew on here...to long to copy it all:
The Missile Will Always Get Through. But who is prepared to admit it?
Aurelien Dec 04 2024
A couple of weeks ago, I explained how the West did not really understand what strategy was, and so, in turn, was quite unable to understand Russian objectives and strategies in the Ukraine crisis. I also suggested that the situation would get worse rather than better, and that soon the West would be receiving some nasty surprises.
Well, hardly had these words been beamed from my keyboard to your screen than the Russians duly obliged by sending a new type of conventional missile to destroy a large factory complex in Ukraine. The western response to this incident has been interesting: a mixture of utter bewilderment, residual delusions of technical superiority, and a hope that there is only one such missile, and so the problem will simply go away. I'm not going to presume to discuss the technical characteristics of the missile and its payload, because I know no more about ballistics and rocketry than most of those who have been busy punditing do. I'm going to talk instead about the strategic and political implications of what happened, and where we might be going. (To some degree this is an update to one of my early essays, and I can claim a degree of prescience.)
Some things are clear.This was an intermediate-range missile, and thus it can reach any part of Europe from western Russia, and parts of the US if it is fired over the Pacific. It carries a conventional payload with apparently six packages of multiple warheads, so enabling thirty-six separate weapons to be landed from high altitude. These weapons appear to be kinetic energy projectiles that impact the ground very fast- ten times the speed of sound has been suggested- so destroying targets by physical force at very high temperature. That's all I'm going to say, because it's all that we know with any certainty, at the time of writing, and I suggest that the details will matter much less in political terms. than the general picture,
Now, any weapon which does not involve physical contact with the enemy, from a bow and arrow up to a ballistic missile, can be described as a "projectile" weapon, and such a weapon has three characteristics: range, accuracy and effect. As you might imagine, these are interdependent. An arrow at the end of its effective range, an explosive charge that is too small, or a powerful bomb dropped inaccurately, will all be less effective than they could be. But let's start with range.
Clearly, if you can engage the enemy from further away than they can engage you, you have an advantage on the battlefield. If you can attack the enemy's rear areas, including their ammunition depots and assembly areas, and they cannot retaliate, you have a greater advantage. And if you can attack the capital city, the factories and the command centres of the enemy, without being equally vulnerable, then you have a very important advantage indeed. Thus, in the current war the Ukrainians have been able to mount a few drone attacks on Moscow, but neither they nor the West have weapons that could reach Moscow reliably and in sufficient numbers from Ukrainian territory against Russian defences, whereas the Russians can strike Kiev pretty much when they want to.
As I've indicated, the projectile obviously has to get as far as the target. In the case of longer-distance weapons, this means not just physically being able to travel the distance, but also surviving any defensive measures that might be employed. Here, we encounter the first critical point with regard to new Russian technologies, but also to traditional Russian strategy and how it differs from that of the West.
Western strategy since the First World War has used manned aircraft to carry out attacks against the enemy. (The Soviet Union only ever toyed with strategic bombing.) The main proponents were the British and the Americans; primarily naval powers, protected by oceans from direct attack, and so used to fighting wars at a distance. The Soviet Union, with extensive frontiers and a tradition of land warfare, saw airpower primarily as a means of directly influencing combat on the ground. Building on its historical interest in artillery, and making use of captured German technology and personnel, the Soviet Union, and subsequently Russia, have put a great deal of effort into the development of missiles of all kinds, both for striking targets at long distance, and for defending against aircraft and missile attack.
The West, by and large, has not. For historical and political reasons, the West has favoured the use of manned aircraft, and has given much less attention to missiles. The western concept of the use of airpower in the Cold War (and it hasn't fundamentally changed) was to blast a hole through Soviet defences using defence suppression weapons (including those that target radars) so that strike aircraft could attack airfields and other priority targets in the rear. This depended, of course, on being able to control the airspace, at least sufficiently for the attacking aircraft to get through, and for some, at least, to get back. But for a long time, strike aircraft have been getting more and more expensive and complex, and have been bought in smaller numbers, whereas anti-aircraft missiles remain an order of magnitude cheaper, and require far less support and training. Whilst it is theoretically possible for western aircraft to attempt to pierce Russian air defences and bomb targets inside the country, the losses are likely to be so enormous that it is questionable if it would be worth the effort, especially with the limited destructive power of the weapons that most western aircraft carry today...
on December 6, 2024, 11:18 pm