William Alberque , Douglas Barrie , Zuzanna Gwadera & Timothy Wright
Russia’s war on Ukraine has been calamitous for its land forces, and an unnecessary tragedy for Ukraine’s people. It has also provided a further proving ground for a variety of ‘ballistic’ and cruise missile types, at once illustrating the utility and sometimes the limitations of such classes of weaponry. The war has for the first time seen the limited use of an air-launched aero-ballistic missile and the large-scale operation of direct attack munitions, or one-way uninhabited aerial vehicles. Cooperation on the latter is drawing Moscow and Tehran closer together, with uncomfortable implications for many countries concerned as to the destabilising behaviour of the two states.
Moscow’s war will almost certainly further fuel the demand for long-range conventionally armed land-attack cruise missiles and pique greater interest in direct attack munitions among state and non-state actors. This is at a time when the arms control architecture for managing ballistic and cruise missile acquisition has already been greatly eroded. The remaining mechanisms for managing the spread of such systems have never been more ill-suited for the task.
Irrespective of the abject failure of Russia’s initial campaign aims, and its now more often sporadic use of land-attack cruise missiles, there is no indication there is any lessening of interest in such systems. Rather, states that already have similar systems, alongside nations that are looking to acquire such capabilities, may draw conclusions that support the development of more capable land-attack cruise missiles, with greater numbers to be held in inventories. Moscow’s use of the Iranian Shahed-136 (Geran-2) direct attack munition, furthermore, will almost certainly encourage others to seek similar weapons, either as an entry-point for a long-range land-attack capability, or as an adjunct to an existing cruise missile inventory.
Alongside the lesson of ‘quantity having a quality of its own’, the comparative success of Ukrainian ground-based air defence in engaging Russian cruise missiles, even if the claims are considerably exaggerated, will propel interest in greater survivability. Options include greater numbers, greater stealth, and greater speed, alongside supplementing cruise missiles with lower-cost higher-volume decoys or direct attack munitions to try to overcome ground-based air defence. Moscow may well redouble its own efforts to develop high-supersonic or hypersonic (Mach 5+) cruise missiles for the land attack role. In turn this may encourage other states to follow suite, or to try to access Russian technology or systems. Tehran has already claimed it is pursuing supersonic missile technology, and Moscow could offer a path to expediting this.
The development of long-range single role-weapons, be it for land-attack against fixed targets or for the anti-ship mission will be replaced increasingly by multi-role weapons capable of being used to engage a broad target set. This poses an additional challenge not only to the defender, but also for any arms control architecture that will need to capture such multi-role weapons. Besides turning to Tehran, Moscow has used some of long-range surface-to-air missile inventory in a secondary surface-to-surface role to supplement its own short-range ballistic missiles (SRBM). It also re-introduced into service an SRBM it had withdrawn, again to bolster its inventory.
Managing emerging demands and technology developments in the long-range precision land-attack realm was a demanding enough task prior to Russia’s full-blown invasion of Ukraine. It is a task now made doubly more difficult by Moscow’s naked aggression.
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