High and low end surface to surface missiles

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There are two land-to-land ballistic rocket design philosophies in the SRBM and MRBM brackets:

One is the kind we in the West have known well for decades. It's high-performing, compact, safe to store for many years, accurate, reliable, proprietary design and most importantly, it's built for manoeuvres and with countermeasures to make intercept super hard.

The other kind is by comparison crude, but can still be made to hit the factory you're aiming it at.

 

The high end rocket defeats defences by surviving them (only to crash into the target soon after). The low end rocket defeats defences by being still a difficult-enough and threatening-enough target to warrant the use of two interceptor missiles that each cost more. This way, defences can be overcome by attrition if you can afford volume production of the attack rocket. On top of this, the low end rocket does almost the same job against undefended or poorly defended targets. Its reliability and precision would be worse, but you'd get the job done at a smaller budget.

A case can be made that a hi-lo mix would make sense, but IMO the case of the high end rockets would be fairly niche. You don't need the ability to overcome defences without attrition or saturation if you have attrition and saturation potential in the arsenal anyway. The only need for the high end would be for naval use (most punch in small weight and volume budget) and for targets that require a very high precision.

Now look at this:

found here

 

Ballistic rockets are different. You do not get REALLY cheap with either them or defences against them. Furthermore, air defence that adapts and achieves a high kill rate would be expensive and thus self-defeating. It would also have a small footprint (small protected area) unless it's intercepting exoatmospheric, which makes the intercept missile really expensive. So it would need to be deployed in many places.

There's thus good reason to believe that an arsenal of low end (kinda affordable) MRBMs would not be defeated in a long time. On the other hand, using economics and thus taking into account interest effects, any big spending on military power long before a war or the need for powerful deterrence would have inflated cost due to accumulated interest. So there's no good reason for lots of countries to build up large low end MRBM arsenals for deterrence. 

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

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