They never completed the improvement package and the whole deal fell through as far as I know.

You are a lucky boy aren’t you Srbin. I’ve found some stuff but not the NAVSEA report that I originall read. This news article roughly covers it though.

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=17330

The significant paragraph being:

Despite the allegations of corruption, the Russian missile has another serious problem — a limited range of 16 miles. Recent tests conducted at Point Mugu, California and the Atlantic Fleet Weapons Test Facility in Puerto Rico show the MA-31 missile unable to fly 50 miles for the Navy target drone requirements. U.S. Navy officials confirmed that they are working to extend the range of the Zvezda MA-31 missile.

Googling around a little shows that it was 4 missiles fired in the first test series at Point Mugu not 5 as I remembered. The short range limitation was a known issue as was the weapon seperation issue that immediately precluded the drone’s release from a manned aircraft. This was the reason for a QF-4 as a launching platform.

Either way one missile out of the four was actually released and flew all the way to target and would have got under the AEGIS/SM-2 defence. The USN were very quick to point out that a small supersonic weapon launched a mere 16nm from target was not exactly an honest test of an area-defence AAW missile though. That kind of target being generally in the territory of a lighter point-defence missile. At least one other missile only managed to fly for about 8km then crashed and, ufortunately, I cant recall what happened to the other two.

Sev,

ANd at what range did Mr Steve think ESM detection would work? Isn’t there some kind of horizon for a Missile’s active radar too? If that missile flies about 15m above sealevel, wouldn’t that radarhorizon be something like 18-20miles? for a high mounted mastreceiver a range of let’s say 30 miles? Wouldn’t that be quite a short range considering that missile goes about 700m/s? If your missile is going something like 300m/s (Harpoon type), wouldn’t that give you almost equally much time to deploy your CM? Or am I missing something here?

What range ESM gets picks up the seeker depends on the profile of the active radar missile I suppose. If its on a lo-lo then it will be at whatever range that weapon is programmed to popup to illuminate its targets. I think someone has mentioned a popup at about 50nm from target for Brahmos on another thread. This would see the initial detection at nearly 3 minutes out. NSM gives no ESM warning so initial detection is when the weapon crosses the sensor horizon. A 70ft masthead radar mount will detect NSM at about 15nm and so will have about 1.5 minutes to initiate countermeasures IF they detect the weapon the second it crosses the horizon!.

I wonder if the sensibilities of the fine people here would be less exercised if Bush and Blair had declared that we were going in to Iraq to remove the regime because it had broken every UN resolution it had signed since the Desert Storm surrender.

Would honouring our own resolutions be sufficient justification to risk the lives of the servicemen out there?. Or do we shift the goalposts whenever its politically expedient to do so because other nations are quite content to turn a blind eye to their commitments?.

Sev,

Hmm, Kondor-E similar to this and where did you get that idea? Seen images of it? Any specifics on it as to have same accuracy, resolution?

The information I got was from a USCC report. It suggested Kondor-E was a modular spacecraft capable of being fitted with either a 1m resolution SAR or an EO payload. The only image I’ve seen of it is an artists impression of the EO variant. Apparently the system is intended to be ready for deployment by 2006. 1m resolution will obviously return significantly higher quality imagery than for the Space Imaging platform but the field of view at that resolution is going to be a small one.

If proven in service and in operational conditions, can you show me any case of NSM doing this? I had contact with the Commander of KNM Skjold, the first ship to be fitted with this system, yet he said they didn’t test it yet…

They tested it in June of this year. The seeker worked, the flight control system worked – with a zigzag course being flown to target and the engine delivered the range promised.

Granit is a SeaSkimmer, only one missile up. Doesn’t that make it as “unseen” as your harpoon? Except for that one missile up, you’ll indeed be warned by that, but as long a you don’t see any more missiles, you can only guess from where they are coming and how many of them are there.

Harpoon?. When did I say I thought Harpoon was a particularly good weapons system?. All Harpoon has going for it is that its cheap, has a decent range and can be carried 4 to a Hornet!.

For your Granit question the lead missile is a giveaway, but, the target worthy of a P700 has Hawkeyes up that will detect the skimmers anyway so the situation isnt really comparable. What I was talking about with NSM was an attack against an opponent without organic AEW seeings its a fairly rare capability not found in most fleets. You and Garry were complaining about me focussing on US vs Russia after all! 🙂

Srbin,

Now as for NSM, how can you think about sinking any sort of carrier group with NSMs which are subsonic, and have a smaller warhead, forget it’s longer range, same with Uran. A Alfa with 200kg warhead and supersonic boost will have 3-4 times bigger chance of sinking anything better, and especially hitting it. As for Uran, yes the NSM is better than it and an all around missile since it is lighter and longer ranged.

You will not sink a carrier with a Klub, Moskit or Yakhont any more than you will with an NSM. Even Granit or Kh-22 will not offer a high percentage of actually sinking a supercarrier so anything lighter is ‘only’ chipping bits off to a greater or lesser degree.

This sounds great news for the carrier at first – until the point is made that operating aircraft aboard ship is a very intricate process and that having a number of 250lb warheads detonate amongst aircraft on the flight deck or slam into the island or the hangar is a pretty good way of stopping those aircraft operations!. Sinking a carrier is not the only way to take it out of a fight.

Also, what is the maximum speed a SM-2, ESSM or CIWS can intercept a supersonic missile. Can they possibly intercept a m5+ Kh-15S.

This image is taken from an SM-2 blkIV as it intercepted a tactical ballistic missile target.

Answer your question?

Ink,

Finding reliable figures for Russian weapons systems is not the easiest of endeavors. The NSM development program though has, to date, cost 1.75 billion Kronor or about US$275 million.

To put this in context with the Russian weapon to develop BrahMos, from the already developed Yakhont airframe, the Indians invested in excess of $200 million. The figures for the development of the basic Yakhont would probably be difficult to sort out as, plainly, aerodynamic research has been borrowed from the work done on P-700.

Even so, looking at total weapon system costs, I’m happy with the assumption that equipping your forces with Yakhont and setting up a targetting infrastructure to support it would be a considerably costlier exercise than adopting NSM.

Sev,

Your right on the image size. I had to crop the original to fit the posting area better. The scale is off by some margin. As to superstructure components I can see foremasts and what could be bridge wings on three of the shapes and this is at a pretty high resolution. The area covered by a radar snapshot at this resolution is very small compared to the surface area that would have to be scanned. Either way the point that I’m trying to underline is that this kind of platfrom is NOT an ocean search sensor suitable for OTH targetting of an antiship weapon.

As for the Gripen, this already requires a close Airbase, it won’t fly as far as the Sukhoi, neither will it be able to launch its missile equially far off. Not good if you ask me. Cheaper, yes, but I suppose that depends on your scenario then.

Referring to Gripen I was implying that an aircraft selected by several nations at the lower end of the market could operate one weapon and, decidedly, not the other. As to being able to fire at a longer range why is this important when facing off against frigate navy? Firing a volley of NSMs at 140kms is hardly much more dangerous than firing a Yakhont at 270.

And you keep saying that NSM is invisible, do you have any proof of that? Doesn’t that mean your plane has to launch it very close to the surface

To a shipboard ESM system yes NSM is quite invisible. The first indication a non-AEW equipped fleet will have of a sea-skimmer is from an ESM intercept of its seeker head during popup. NSM denies this information to its target this means that the first indication a vessel will have that the weapon is inbound may be when it crosses that vessels sensor horizon. A minute or so warning isn’t a lot to go from air-raid condition set to hard-kill cueing and soft-kill deployment especially not if you’re facing multiple inbounds!.

You’re thinking too much on economics too, since Indian and Chinese don’t seem to think about that at all…..Basically you’re connecting “best missile” to “cheapest thing around”…

My criteria for ‘best all-round missile’ would certainly include costs. Not just missile unit costs but cost-to-employ. For Yakhont, Klub and those types of weapons that is many times the value that NSM would return. To be effective you need a decent inventory of the weapons to use. Look at Argentina’s situation with the AM-39’s 5 weapons did not stretch very far. India according to SIPRI has, very sensibly, ordered over 400 Kh-35’s and 96 3M-54E1’s – enough for a sustained military action. What use is acquiring a few ‘golden bullet’ Yakhonts if you shoot off your arsenal and the opponent is still coming? Cost is definitely a significant factor in a weapons usefulness.

I think that makes it about 6 against 2 now. Seahawk make that 2 beers shipmate!. I really love this site sometimes!.

I dont think Nuke intended his commentry as particularly hostile Sev. I certainly didnt read it as such. In many ways he has interpreted what I’ve been saying accurately. What he’s shown me is that I need to explain exactly why I’m so ‘convinced’ that my opinion is the correct one here as my, basic, message isnt getting through.

Maybe its more efficient of me to change perspective and outline my view on naval operations and capabilities in order to explain why I view the Russian weapons in question so dimly. Here goes :-

First off no-one is fighting the Cold War anymore. No-one – not even the Chinese if they’re smart. Those ‘battles’ have been analysed to death by every major weapons/countermeasures designer out there for the past three decades. The Soviet-era heavy weapons as we know were large airframes that relied on the brute force approach to penetrate defensive systems. As Garry’s stated in the past they simply accepted the fact that weapons, being large and employing the profiles they did, would be detected, intercepted and decoyed. They accepted this on the belief that they would always be able to fire enough to make sure a few would get through and a nuclear warhead or two would be the end of the issue. As a strategy it was a very difficult one to argue with as effectively they only needed one lucky break to win.

That approach is inappropriate for anyone other than the Soviet Union 20 years ago though. Today no-one, not even the Russians, have the ISTAR capability to fix a deployed carrier group and hold it for sufficient duration to assemble and vector a strike. Plus the luxury of not having to worry about going nuclear isnt quite an option now that a major naval action is no longer a just a milestone on the way to ragnarok.

Going back to topic though the Soviets, being well aware what AEGIS meant for P-500/700/Kh-22, rushed development on 3M-80 to get a countering system fielded. They ran out of politics before the potentially useful Kh-41 air-launched variant could be delivered though. Moskit ended up doing little more than exposing a critical vulnerability in the AEGIS/SPY system in time for the Americans to plug it before the step change to littoral warfare took place. Somewhat ironically this being the only environment where the relatively short-ranged surface launched Moskit could have been effective.

Seeking to capitalise on the state-funded development work from P-700 and RKV-500 the Russians evolved the Yakhont and Klub 3M-54 series. These address the deployability issue well, it being quite handy not needing to have Backfires Kirovs and Oscars to be able to use them, but all bar the 3M-54E variant still utilise familiar flight profiles, from the earlier weapons, and established technology. These drawbacks are well covered in the thread.

For Cold War US vs Russia, as Sev and Garry believe I’m discussing, this is a mistake for obvious reasons. Same old approach = same old defence. It may now be Yakhont vs ESSM instead of SM2 vs Kh-22 but the calculus still holds – everything is just a bit faster and a bit smaller!. This is why I’m expressly NOT thinking in terms of US/Russia.

What I am more thinking about is the rest of the world as client nations. This is largely because the US has such a lead in expeditionary warfare that I dont believe they can be successfully challenged even if anyone wanted to.

This isnt some form of sycophantic hero-worship American good/Russian bad thing please believe me. They are just ahead of the game today by a huge margin and are developing ISTAR/weapons systems that will allow them to target and initiate strikes ashore from ranges in excess of 600nm with very low detect-to-impact cycles. That kind of capability is not going to be countered with a dozen manned MarPats and a couple of RORSAT-type birds for targetting and a stack of P-700’s, KH-22’s, Yakhonts, Klubs or any other of those systems however supersonic, armoured and ecm’d up they may be.

To beat the Americans at their game China, India or whoever have two options:

a) Develop the capability to go toe-to-toe with the USN in blue water. This means matching carrier capabilities and deployable numbers. It means matching SSN capabilities in quality and quantity and it means matching ISTAR assets and netcentric capabilities. I dont know of a single naval analyst who believes there is anyone who can achieve that in the forseeable future. India has, in fact, already precluded this option by going for Admiral Gorshkov and STOBAR carriers for the next 30 years.

b) Develop the ability to start their coastal defence 400nm offshore and make it, if you forgive the pun, watertight!. The most practical way I can envisage this is with high-endurance UAV/UCAV’s acting as surveillance platforms and first-stage buses for, perhaps, a dozen or so ‘lightweight’ NSM-style AShM’s. Weapons that can be launched immeditely on an initial detection, not just hope the survillance platform stays ‘alive’ and in contact until a heavy strike package can be launched and vectored from ashore. Weapons that are passive and give scant indication that theyre on the way, are smart enough to reject targets not found in their onboard threat-database and to target specific vulnerable zones on hostile ships i.e radars, weapons mounts, chopper hangars, ordnance lifts etc. If four or more of these UAV/UCAV’s can be coordinated, in realtime, to have their weapons arrive simultaneously from multiple axis enough ships could be mission-killed to turn a carrier deployment around. Not as ‘sexy’ as Granit-struck carriers turning tail burning from stem-to-stern, but, who really cares if it sends the USN home before they can hurt you?.

This relies, of course, on the premise that an emerging-superpower, wishing to seek to dispute US hegemony, would choose to do so militarily and would commit to the massive expenditures on developing these kinds of systems and all the support infrastructure necessary to employ them. My read is that no-one is dumb enough to try that. The US CVSG is therefore, IMO, going to remain unchallenged for a very long time to come.

Now we’ve done away with the anti-superpower scenario we have to look around and evaluate the requirements, capabilities and threats facing the smaller regional navies and airforces. Here we see lots of navies carrying on with frigate sized hulls, and downwards, embarking subskimmers of whatever flavour. We also see many airforces with three or so squadrons max of naval strike tasked tactical fastjets also carrying subsonic skimmers. The greatest challenge to these services in sinking neighbours ships is finding them and getting a positive ID prior to engagement – it comes down to ISTAR again!. Very few of these frigates have hardkill capability better than a basic PDMS and maybe a CIWS. They nearly all mount some form of ESM and offboard decoy system though. A big supersonic Klub or Yakhont is therefore unnecessary and, thanks to its size and targetting requirement, perhaps even a handicap. Plus an ARH is vulnerable to the one defensive system that is common and relatively easy to keep updated economically.

In addition, as I’ve said ad nauseum, an active radar homer, supersonic or otherwise, is of very little value where RoE’s are in place to protect friendly and neutral shipping. A weapon like NSM removes that RoE no-fire limitation as, thanks to the target-recognition system, it will not attack a target it cant positively match to its threat database. This also adds for a greater confidence in attacking surface targets on a ‘vague’ detection. What you could conceivably have is an opponent with Harpoon, MM40, Uran or whichever one of the other ARH weapons waiting for further confirmation and evaluation on a target before getting permission to engage while the NSM ship has already fired and has missiles bearing down on target.

There is no Russian, American, Chinese or European 140km-ranged antiship weapon I am aware of, supersonic or not, that gives that kind of operational flexibility to a ships warfare team. Hope this clears up my reasoning a little.

Note for Sev,

You mentioned Kondor-E as a sat targetting platform for Yakhont. This isnt the case in antiship terms. Kondor-E is a radar imaging bird used to support Yakhont-M land-attack targetting. An imaging SAR system like this isnt capable of providing naval targetting data any more than an optical reconsat would. They can provide the cueing for another system to start a track from perhaps, but, with SAR resolution comes at a price – a very narrow field of view.

The below image is the 8m resolution image of Singapore Harbour from the Space Imaging RADARSAT. This is a 50km square sector which is the maximum snapshot at that resolution. Which ones are the tankers and which are the container ships? Space Imaging lists the RADARSAT as being capable of 500km deep coverage along its orbital path but only with a resolution of 100m and at that definition you dont get detail!. How long would it take to scan the Indian Ocean looking at 50 sq.km blocks at a time I wonder!.

Indian

the RN inspite of its >1 carriers cannot go into the kind of battle the Kuznetsov(fully trained up) or the Cdg can do and expect to survive. the RN doesnt have any Aegis or Aster equipped ships at the moment, nor fix-wing carrier borne E2

Well it would take a major commitment but, for about 12 months or so, the RN could still deploy on short notice, 2 CVS’s and 5 Type42’s and maintain them on station with ship rotation. That gives a maximum effort airgroup of something like 18 FA.2 and 9 GR7 Harriers with space left for Merlin ASW choppers and ASAC7 Sea Kings. It also gives an AAW screen with a halfway decent missile and 10 fire-channels.

FA.2 is still capable of deploying AIM120, ALARM and, if they were to be brought out of storage and refurbished, Sea Eagle AShM. The GR7’s bring PavewayIII, Maverick and, according to the RAF, potentially Storm Shadow to the fleet strike potential.

That airgroup is capable of BVR fleet air defence, SEAD, Antiship strike, standoff precision attack and strike missions. It is also maintainable on station for an indefinite period.

The handicaps are the small pool of FA.2’s meaning that attrition would be a critical factor in fleet ops. That same factor effects both the Russians and the French to a worse degree however as neither has as large a pool of fighters to call on as the RN!.

The other thing, of course, is that the FA.2’s disappear in a couple of years, so, at that point the ‘dependent on US air power’ accusation becomes true….we’re not quite there yet though!.

Dionis its not even nearly that simple.

MiG-31’s? The Backfires are being tooled up with AS-16s to go US carrier-hunting and you think the FOXHOUNDs, their premier anti-bomber/anti-cruise platform, would be chopped to AV-MF for bomber escort???. Whats an Su-27SM? Does it exist yet or is it some kind of upgrade or what? Does it have the endurance to try for a fighter sweep to shoot in the Backfires x00nm from their coast? Don’t know?.

Irrelevant anyway unless they take along a MAINSTAY to control their air picture. If they dont they’re fighting blind and blind in a battlespace where the USN fighters, directed by E-2’s and perhaps the odd shipboard set, see everything! Does an AMRAAM outrange whatever your alphabet-soup Flanker shoots – I’ve no idea to be honest, but, its largely irrelevant again. All the fighter director has to do is bring in his CAPs nose cold for beam/tail shots outside of the coverage of the bomber/fighters sensor cones. Without situational awareness what chance do the Russians have?. Thats before we even start talking about SAM ships, SAM traps and threat axis!?

A Backfire, or anything else airborne and inidentified, would not be allowed to close to 150km of an alert carrier group.