Missile technology could be used to defeat Raytheon’s state-of-the-art defense systems

Russia has obtained Israel’s most advanced interceptor missile, which could be reverse engineered to crack the latest Israeli and US air defence systems, according to news reports.

China’s SINA news agency reported that an Israeli Stunner interceptor missile was captured by the Syrians and handed over to the Russians after Israel fired two Stunners at potentially threatening missiles.

“It’s certainly a concern. If I was at Rafael, I’d be nervous right now,” Ian Williams, deputy director of the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic International Studies, told Business Insider. “If I was Israel, my big concern is that if Russia can get the intelligence to defeat the interceptor to Iran,” Williams added.

If the SINA story is true, this is a big loss for Israel and the United States. US defense giant Raytheon is incorporating an adaption of the Stunner missile into its Patriot air defense system with Poland projected as the first customer. Israel is adopting the same technology into a version (Python 6) of its Python air to air missile, giving it the possibility to go after high-value targets with a sophisticated beyond visual range new generation missile.

Both Raytheon and Rafael will need to make technological changes so that Russia won’t be able to create ways to defeat the system. Whether the Russians can copy it depends a lot on whether Russia has the technological capability to do the cloning. It is likely some elements, including the 3D AESA millimeter-wave radar, will be a very big obstacle for them to overcome.

The Stunner missile is the interceptor part of the Israeli air defense system known as David’s Sling, which is designed to intercept enemy aircraft, drones, cruise missiles, tactical ballistic missiles and medium to long-range rockets. Most of the Stunner’s design was done by Raytheon, with help from Rafael Advanced Defense Systems in Israel.

The Stunner is aimed at defeating all short-range missiles, which represents 92% of all missiles in global inventories. Given the recent successful cruise missile and drone attacks in Saudi Arabia, the importance of Stunner and David’s Sling should not be underestimated.

Missile launch

On July 23, 2018, Israel’s army (IDF) detected the launch of two Russian-made OTR Tochka (SS-21) missiles from Syrian territory. The IDF’s computers projected the Russian missiles, that have a 1,000-pound warhead (482 kg) were heading into Israeli territory from Syria.

Two things happened: civilian defense sirens warned citizens in northern Israel to take cover (Israel has shelters throughout the country) and the IDF activated its new David’s Sling system firing two missiles at the Tochka rockets.

A few seconds after the Stunner missile launch, Israel’s radars determined that the Tochka rocket trajectory meant the missiles would not enter Israeli territory. A destruct command was sent to the Stunner missiles. One exploded over Israeli territory but the IDF does not know what happened to the second missile. Once the destruct command was sent, the IDF no longer tracked the missile.

The missile that disappeared did not self destruct, according to reports from the SINA news agency. The agency said an intact Stunner missile was recovered by the Syrians and handed over to the Russians.

The Stunner missile itself is very sophisticated. It is a new generation of missiles that uses “hit-to-kill” technology instead of explosive warheads. It works by directly striking an enemy warplane or missile at very high speed.

Hit-to-kill

A key advantage of the hit-to-kill approach is that there is little collateral damage and the level of kill assurance is either 100% or zero. Hit-to-kill missiles are ostensibly more efficient since if they hit their targets the threat is eliminated. Conventional missiles use explosive warheads that detonate in proximity to a threat, which may or may not destroy the target. For that reason, two missiles are usually launched at an incoming target to raise the kill percentage to the 90 percentile range.

But there is also a problem with hit-to-kill weapons. If they miss their targets, they fall to earth.

If the hit-to-kill missile is used in the exo-atmosphere, it is likely to burn up on reentry.  But if its trajectory is within the atmosphere, the Stunner or other hit-to-kill system could survive impact. The best modern missiles are built to withstand heavy G-forces, heat and extreme vibration, so the electronics are well protected, raising the odds of recoverability.

There are also limitations to the destruct mechanism since it depends on a successful command being sent from a ground station before the missile hits its target. There does not appear to be a mechanism for vehicle destruction based on vehicle speed and/or altitude if it misses the target or is lost for other reasons.

Israeli capabilities

In 2018 Israel was involved in a number of significant challenges coming from Syria, mostly directly from Iranian forces based there. The Iranians, probably with Russian connivance, were interested in testing Israeli capabilities and response times to a variety of threats.

On February 10, 2018, the Iranians launched a Saegheh drone into northern Israel. The Saegheh (Thunderbolt) is the Iranian copy of the American RQ-170, a stealth drone built by Lockheed Martin. (An RQ-170 was captured by the Iranians on December 4, 2011, and reverse engineered.)  When the Saegheh was shot down by an Israeli AH-64 Apache helicopter over the city of Beit Shean, the Iranians found out that Israeli air defenses clearly saw their “stealth” drone copy and destroyed it.

On the same day, an Israeli F-16I jet was hit by a Syrian S-200 (SA-5) interceptor missile over Israeli territory and destroyed. Apparently the pilot had shut down the jet’s radar warning systems once they were “safely” over Israeli territory (having returned from earlier operations in Syria).

In September 2018 a Syrian S-200 SAM shot down a Russian IL-20M airborne command post as it was on final approach to Russia’s Khmeimin airbase in Syria. The Russians blamed Israel, saying the Israeli Air Force flew in the radar “shadow” of the IL-20M to avoid Syrian air defenses. Some months before, starting on May 10, 2018, Israel’s air force had run “Operation House of Cards” against Russian-made but Syrian operated air defense systems including the Pantsir S-1 (which the Russians had just finished upgrading), the S-75 Dvina (based on the SA-2) and the S-200 system.

The Stunner missile is very sophisticated and has state of the art technology in it. This includes an active, electronically scanned (AESA) 3D Millimeter-wave radar, dual electro-optical sensors to aid target identification and location, an imaging infrared seeker to guide the missile, three data links back to its command and control center and automatic and manual targeting capability including the ability to adjust its flight path to deal with an attacking system that changes course. This package and the logic software supporting it certainly is of prime interest to Russian experts.

Source: https://www.asiatimes.com/2019/11/article/russia-given-israels-top-interceptor-missile/

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And there is a problem: A reactor that powers one of these weapons might have created “possibly one of the worst nuclear accidents in the region since Chernobyl.”

A mysterious explosion at Russia’s Nenoksa Missile Test Site on Aug. 8, 2019, killed at least seven people and caused a radiation spike that sent everyday Russians hurrying to pharmacies to buy anti-radiation pills.

The explosion reportedly involved a small nuclear reactor that powers a new kind of long-range cruise missile.

“United States intelligence officials have said they suspect the blast involved a prototype of what NATO calls the SSC-X-9 Skyfall,” The New York Times reported.

“That is a cruise missile that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin has boasted can reach any corner of the earth because it is partially powered by a small nuclear reactor, eliminating the usual distance limitations of conventionally fueled missiles.”

An accidental explosion is exactly the risk that Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, feared when he described the SSC-X-9 as “bats**t crazy.”

Putin revealed the SSC-X-9 in July 2018 as one of a host of atomic weapons that he claimed the Russian military would develop in order to boost the country’s nuclear deterrence.

“Any use of nuclear weapons against Russia or its allies, any kind of attack, will be regarded as a nuclear attack against Russia and in response, we will take action instantaneously no matter what the consequences are,” Putin said. “Nobody should have any doubt about that.”

An animation Putin introduced featured five weapons. The Samrat intercontinental ballistic missile, the Project 4202 hypersonic glide vehicle, a long-range torpedo, and the Kinzhal air-to-surface missile all had been in development for years.

“None of this will give Russia an advantage,” said Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project in Washington, D.C.

But the fifth weapon—the SSC-X-9—was unknown to the public before Putin’s speech. The new missile is meant to avoid American missile-defenses, which are optimized for shooting down incoming ballistic missiles that fly high in the atmosphere and thus are easy to detect on radar.

“We’ve developed new strategic weapons that don’t use ballistic trajectory at all, which means that missile defense will be useless against it,” Putin said.

The cruise missile with its “nuclear-power energy unit” possesses advantages over conventionally-powered munitions. “It has unlimited range, so it can keep going like this forever,” Putin said as the animation depicted a missile crossing the Atlantic Ocean and changing course to avoid U.S. Navy warships, presumably equipped with anti-missile weapons.

“This is unheard of and no one has this system in the world,” Putin said of the nuclear-powered missile.

That’s not true. The U.S. military in the 1960s worked on a cruise missile powered by a tiny and unsafe atomic reactor.

“It was an environmental nightmare,” Lewis explained. Every time the military launched a nuclear-powered cruise missile, even in testing, it would’ve sent a potentially unstable reactor out into the world without many safeguards to prevent accidents.

The Pentagon canceled the project in 1964.

But those risks did not deter Russia from developing its own atomic-powered missile. “Putin doesn’t have to worry about pesky environmentalists,” Lewis said.

“For all the hype, Russia’s early tests of the cruise missile appeared to fail, even before last week’s disaster,” The New York Times noted on Aug. 12, 2019. “And Russia’s story about what happened Thursday in the sea off one of its major missile test sites has changed over the past four days as the body count has risen.”

“Beyond the human toll, American intelligence officials are questioning whether Mr. Putin’s grand dream of a revived arsenal evaporated in that mysterious explosion, or whether it was just an embarrassing setback in Moscow’s effort to build a new class of long-range and undersea weapons that the United States cannot intercept.”

The August 2019 explosion, which The New York Times described as “possibly one of the worst nuclear accidents in the region since Chernobyl,” underscores the danger that Putin’s new super-weapon poses. Possibly to the United States. And certainly to his own people.

David Axe serves as Defense Editor of the National Interest. He is the author of the graphic novels  War Fix, War Is Boring and Machete Squad.

Source: https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/russia-has-nuclear-powered-cruise-missile-yes-you-read-right-73146

The post Russia Has a Nuclear-Powered Cruise Missile. Yes, You Read That Right. first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

The suspected nuclear explosion occurred Thursday off the coast of Russia’s Nenoska Missile Test Site, an installation suspected of developing Russia’s next generation of advanced missiles. Seven people were reportedly killed.

“The United States is learning much from the failed missile explosion in Russia,” Trump tweeted Monday. “We have similar, though more advanced, technology. The Russian ‘Skyfall’ explosion has people worried about the air around the facility and far beyond. Not good!”

Russian media reported radiation briefly spiked to 200 times the normal rate, according to the New York Times, but these reports were later scrubbed from the websites of Severodvinsk, a small city located 25 miles away from the explosion in Russia’s Archangel province. Fears over radiation poisoning caused a run on iodine by local residents, which can protect the thyroid gland from absorbing radiation.

Experts and intelligence officials believe the explosion was the result of a botched test of a nuclear-powered cruise missile known by NATO as the SSC-X-9 Skyfall.

“Our working hypothesis is that the event in Russia yesterday was related to Russia’s nuclear-powered cruise missile, the 9M730 Burevestnik (NATO name: SSC-X-9 Skyfall,” Jeffrey Lewis, an arms control expert at the Middlebury Institute, said Friday on Twitter. “Possibly a botched recovery effort involving the Serebryanka […]”

The Serebryanka is a Russian nuclear fuel carrier, which an image from Planet Labs shows was near the test site at the time of the incident. The ship was last reported as of Monday in Murmansk, a port 355 miles from Severodvinsk.

Russia is believed to have conducted a partially successful test of the Skyfall on Jan. 29, preceding the Trump administration’s announcement removing the U.S. from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty on Feb. 2. The missile’s small nuclear reactor theoretically makes it capable of traveling across the globe for an indefinite amount of time. It is also believed to be capable of avoiding conventional missile defense systems.

This isn’t the first incident involving the Skyfall. Russian Navy ships were sent to search for the remains of a Skyfall missile in August after it landed off the coast of northern Russia in March 2018 during a failed test. Putin unveiled the missile that same month, bragging that it renders defense systems “useless.” He went on to make a thinly-veiled threat against the U.S.

“I want to tell all those who have fueled the arms race over the last 15 years, sought to win unilateral advantages over Russia, introduced unlawful sanctions aimed to contain our country’s development … you have failed to contain Russia,” he said.

“Nobody listened to us. Well, listen to us now.”

Source: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/defense-national-security/trump-us-has-better-weapons-than-the-failed-russian-skyfall-missile

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