Cruise missiles CK Oct 04.indd

M I S S I L E S When Fieseler’s engineers perfected the V-1 ‘doodlebug’ in 1944, little could they have imagined the long term impact of their creativity. The V-1 became the forerunner of a family of weapons which has decisively infl uenced many aspects of modern air warfare since then, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. The media defi nition of a cruise missile is any weapon similar to the US Navy Tomahawk or US Air Force AGM-86 ALCM/CALCM, but the technical definition is any weapon which automatically fl ies an essentially horizontal cruise fl ight profi le for most of the duration of its fl ight between launch and its terminal trajectory to impact. They can be further divided into ‘tactical’/’sub-strategic’/’theatre’ and ‘strategic’ categories, and then divided by warhead into ‘nuclear’ and ‘conventional’. A further division, somewhat arbitrary with the arrival of the SLAM/ Block II Harpoon and Russian equivalents, is the split between ‘Anti-Ship Cruise Missiles’ (ASCMs) and ‘Land Attack Cruise Missiles’ (LACMs). The most widely deployed are ASCMs, which typically start with ranges of tens of nautical miles, with warhead sizes around 100kg, and subsonic cruise profi les. The Exocet, Harpoon, Kh-35U and YJ-8 families are the most widely used examples. At the opposite end of this spectrum are the awesome Russian heavyweights, like the rocket propelled subsonic 2.5 tonne class Styx family (Chinese C601/611 Kraken), the Mach 3+ six tonne class Kh22M Burya (AS-4), the ramjet Mach 2+ 4.5 tonne class Kh-41 Sunburn, and three tonne class Kh-61 Yakhont/Brahmos. Less widely deployed but increasingly available are land attack cruise missiles in various forms, including derivatives of anti-ship cruise missiles. To date the most widely used weapons in this class are the UGM/RGM-109 TLAM (Tomahawk Land Attack Missile) family and AGM-86C CALCM, with the Apache/Storm Shadow, KEPD-350, AGM-158 JASSM, Kh-55/65 (AS-15), 3M-54/3M-14 (SS-N-27) and Chinese clones now entering service. From a technology perspective, the ‘commodifi cation’ of GPS, Ring Laser Gyro, third generation microprocessor and Monolithic Microwave IC technologies will have a major long term impact, reducing guidance package costs, but also breaking down the historical technology barriers which limited large scale inventories to the US and USSR. Modern guidance technology has already seen the absorption and reuse of Cold War era cruise missile warstocks, with the remanufacture of US Navy UGM/RGM-109 Tomahawk Anti-Ship Missile (TASM) and US Air Force AGM-86B (nuclear ALCM) airframes into conventional LACMs. The large remaining warstock of Russian weapons may also see reuse, the recent guidance upgrade package for the Kh-22M being a good example, as well as the ever evolving Chinese C-601/611. Strategically, precision guided cruise missiles can have signifi cant military effect, but even inaccurate guidance permits their use as terror weapons against civilians, as the Scud has been used. Historically, the main attraction in cruise missiles has always been in the often very signifi cant standoff range provided, keeping the delivery platform out of the reach of most if not all air defence weapons. An equal attraction has been the diffi culty in detecting, tracking and killing a small and often very low fl ying cruise missile. The drawback in all cruise missiles has always been economic – the warhead weight was typically less than 50%, while the cost of these weapons has been of the order of 50 times or greater than guided bombs. Complex guidance and propulsion systems have been the main cost drivers. While the US have repeatedly performed large scale bombardments using up to several hundred weapons per bombing campaign, the cost proved unsustainable even for the US budget. The current effort to fi eld the ‘low cost’ $US500,000 class JASSM and ‘Tactical Tomahawk’ weapons refl ects this reality – even at half of the cost of older cruise missiles. Primarily these weapons will be used to kill heavily defended high value targets. For the ADF, cruise missiles will likely become the principal missile defence and air defence issue in coming decades, refl ecting not only the wide proliferation of shorter ranging ASCMs and land attack missile derivatives, but also the strategic imDefeating Cruise Missiles