Cheap cruise missiles

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The Russo-Ukrainian War brought something to public view that wasn't obvious. Even I didn't really grasp it, despite having mentioned it years ago.

There's a huge range of targets for small, cheap cruise missiles with a rather small (~ artillery grenade size rather than aircraft bomb size) warhead. 

The embodiment of this kind of cruise missile is the Shaheed-136. 

 

Shaheed-136 (c) alexpl

Hobbyist-grade propeller propulsion and navigation.

~ 200 kg total mass

~ 50 kg warhead

2,500 km claimed range (more likely less than 2,000 km)

It's obvious that this can be improved on, but the fact that a cruise missile costing low six digits (EUR or USD) would not just be a decoy, but actually a severe threat is a huge deal. Air defences are not prepared for this, albeit there was someone arguing that our air defences should include cheap missiles to intercept munitions rather than platforms.

Most air defence missiles are more expensive than such a cruise missile. The cheaper ones could largely be avoided by flying very low on well-planned (and varying) routes.

The attacker has the advantage because it can funnel a salvo of a thousand cruise missiles through a 10 km wide corrider within minutes, while defenders with cheap missiles would need to have them spread out over a defensive belt because those cheap defence missiles will have poor range unless they are very similar to their targets (a kind of unmanned kamikaze interceptor plane). Being too similar leads to an insufficient or no speed advantage, so there's stills some advantage of the attacker. Moreover, the defender may suffer damage on critical infrastructure, military equipment or economic installations on the ground, while the attacker doesn't (save for accidents).*

Aircraft on the ground are vulnerable high value targets, but they may be moved during the hours of flight of such a drone. Infrastructure and certain industry installations are more interesting and more reliable (backup?) targets. 

There are about 300 high voltage transformer stations in the German power grid; a rich country of approx. 82 million people. Several thousand more transformer stations are in the medium and low voltage grid (source, more here and a list here). One of the largetst German cities, Hamburg, has only three major transformer stations.

The sizes of such transformer stations range from small & elegant to huge. Permanent damage is particularly easy to inflict when you can hit the control building with a warhead, such as a single 50 kg high explosive warhead. 

A handful of such transformer stations can be switched to simplistic controls or be repaired, but hundreds or thousands hit within hours or weeks would vastly exceed the short-term repair capability of the entire Western world.

The locations and network are published. Aerial photography is available (Google Maps and similar) as well and everyone can do a bit of aerial scouting with a cheap consumer drone. The damage potential of even tiny payloads such as a molotov cocktail was shown to the public when the power supply of the new Tesla factory near Berlin was cut for days with a small fire.

So basically a wave of 5,000 drones costing each less than 200,000 € (total value 1 bn € only!) would stand a near-100% chance to destroy the German economy with little chance of repair within months or even one or two years. The damage could be trillions of Euros. Quadruple that budget to a mere 4 bn € and you can switch off the European economy.

We aren't even close to having any defence against that. Most likely we couldn't even tell our own Galileo global positioning satellites to stop providing service in time.

 

The electrical grid isn't the only essential asset that could be targeted and ruines by small payload cruise missiles. The entire chemical and petrochemical industries including oil and gas pipeline pump stations, oil refineries, oil storage sites, airport kerosene tanks is extremely vulnerable.

It's an enduring mystery why the Ukrainians don't apply the main effort concept and knock out one sector - railway, power grid, gas grid or fuel supply of Western Russia. They could, but they're sending their drones out as if all they were mentally capable of was spray & pray (most likely the damned "escalation manager" scum in Washington, DC and Berlin are at fault for this).

Such cheap and light cruise missiles aren't the only kind of cruise missiles that was neglected until recently. The old V-1 would be very much viable if equipped with hobbyist-grade computer, navigation and altimeter equipment. 850 kg warhead to 250 km or 250 kg to 500 km? That's clearly feasible, and all you need for survivability is distraction, flying extremely low (accurate navigation, accurate route planning, calm weather and an accurate altimeter suffice for flying between treetops) and saturation. The price of a V-1 was about the price of a sedan car at its time (with forced labour). We could produce such missiles in a car factory by the ten thousands in a year. The supply of enough explosives would be the only actual challenge in my opinion.

250...850 kg warheads can thus be deliverd to several hundred km depth at about Mach 0.4 for very little cost. The biggest expense of an accurized treetop altitude flight V-1 would probably be the explosives, which could be plain TNT or even cheaper Amatol. A quantity production on a conveyor belt assembly line could keep the cost per missile without explosives below 15,000 € even if we install a Starlink interface, a thermal camera, good intertial navigation, radio or laser altimeter and a military grade GPS/Galileo receiver.

The cruise missiles as we know them since the 80's, but in conventional form especially by Americans bombing Muslims since 1991 are based on a nuclear cruise missile paradigm. The high cost of a nuclear warhead and the need to deter by credibility did lead to that kind of cruise missile. Some later tactical aircraft-launched cruise missiles were essentially the same with less fuel and thus less range.

To leave this high end paradigm allows for cheap small warhead good range cruise missiles and for cheap big warhead short range cruise missiles. Both could be launched in saturating attack waves of hundreds of missiles and could be built to be very resilient to electronic countermeasures.

There's no lack of important yet vulnerable targets for such missiles.

I really wonder why anyone thinks we should invest in expensive strike packages, expensive stealth bombers or pays attention to nonsense such as Oreshnik. Luxembourg could afford airpower that could bring Russia to its knees within weeks!

BTW; it takes three freighters (cost less than 300 million dollars) loaded with three billion dollars worth of such cruise missiles in Pacific Ocean, Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean to crash the U.S. economy in a strategic surprise attack. The ANG could not stop enough of them. Even a shadowing USN destroyer would not be able to do much, as the rocket-assisted launches could be compressed into a minute or less.

three 2,000 km radius circles

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

*: Here is an explanation why a belt is usually superior to point defence.

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