A Low Down Attack On Anti-Missile Missiles
Strategy Page, November 6, 2008
Russia is shipping some SS-26 “Iskander” ballistic missiles to Kaliningrad, as a way to threaten the new NATO anti-missile system being built in Poland. This Russian deployment is all about a unique feature of Iskander, which is that it is not a traditional ballistic missile. That is, it does not fire straight up, leave the atmosphere, then come back down, following a ballistic trajectory. Instead, Iskander stays in the atmosphere and follows a rather flat trajectory. It is capable of evasive maneuvers and deploying decoys. This makes it more difficult for anti-missile systems to take it down. Russia is buying several dozen Iskanders for its own military. These versions have a longer range (400 km) and more countermeasures (to interception). Russia will not provide details. Russia has admitted that it could use Iskander to destroy the US anti-missile systems in a pre-emptive attack. Just in case Russia wanted to start World War III for some reason or another. This Iskander deployment is mainly a publicity stunt, unless you want to seriously consider the possibility that the Russians are trying to start a nuclear war.
Kaliningrad is the perfect place for Russia to start World War III. The city is the former German city of Konisgberg, which was captured at the end of World War II, and kept by Russia, as the boundaries of Eastern Europe were rearranged in the late 1940s. Until 1991, Kaliningrad was on the Soviet Union’s western border. But when the Soviet Union dissolved that year, and more than half the Soviet Union split away to regain their independence as 14 new nations, Kaliningrad found itself nestled between Poland and the newly re-established Lithuania. The small (200 sq km, 400,000 Russians, the Germans were expelled 60 years ago) city is still the headquarters of the Russian Baltic fleet and protected by a large force of troops and warplanes. The Iskander missiles will feel right at home.
The Iskander finally completed its development in the last few years. The 3.8 ton missile has a range of 280 km, and a 900 lb warhead. Russia sells several different types of warheads, including cluster munitions, thermobaric (fuel-air explosive) and electro-magnetic pulse (anti-radar, and destructive to electronics in general.) There is also a nuclear warhead, which is not exported. Guidance is very accurate, using GPS, plus infrared homing for terminal guidance. The warhead will land within 30 ft of the aim point. Iskanders are carried in a 20 ton 8×8 truck, which also provides a launch platform. There is also a reload truck that carries two missiles.
Russia developed the solid fuel Iskander to replace its Cold War era SS-23 battlefield ballistic missiles (which in turn had replaced SCUD). The SS-23 had to be withdrawn from service and destroyed by 1991, because the 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty prohibited missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,300 km. When post Cold War financial problems slowed down development of Iskander, this left Russia dependent on the shorter range (120 km) SS-21 system, along with some aging SCUDS, for battlefield ballistic missile support. Russia used some of these older missiles against Chechen rebels in the 1990s.
November 6, 2008 at 5:35 pm
The Iskander is not a ballistic missile at all. There’s a much simpler definition of ‘ballistic’ than the one in the article. Simply put, a ballistic missile’s trajectory is determined at launch. A bullet is a perfect example. The Iskander is a NON-ballistic trajectory missile and it will prove to be a huge headache for ABM systems predicated on intercepting a missile on a ballistic, and thus calculable or predictable, trajectory.
ABM was doomed from the outset to remain pie in the sky because the advantage will always be with the incoming missile. There are just too many practical and relatively cheap means of deceiving ABM detection and launch systems. Putin has offered to fill any gaps in in the NATO ABM system with Russian missiles and the offer was turned down. That refusal gives him the right to assume the worst and pre-emptively disable or destroy the offending NATO systems. Doing so will not start WWIII. But it’s a moot point. NATO’s position is now untenable. It’ll take less than 6 months for the construction of the bases to be abandoned. There could be nothing more revealing for the General Public, and humiliating for the profiteering arms industry, than to have Putin destroy a “state of the art” ABM system (with a few missiles) on the first attempt. And that’s the prognosis if NATO doesn’t cease and desist.
November 6, 2008 at 5:48 pm
US ABM systems are so primitive and unreliable that they rely on nuclear war-heads to compensate for their lack of accuracy. Those nuclear war-heads are what Putin objects to. An ABM can be used as a tactical nuke by the simple expedient of reprogramming its navigation computer.