The Russians can make missiles – of this there is no doubt. Nato surface-navy warfare officers – my old job – train against their ship-killers constantly and there are so many types, it takes a while to learn their individual characteristics so that you can instinctively defend against them.
The good news is that in missile warfare, especially dealing with Russian weapons, ‘claimed’ and ‘actual’ capabilities are often very different. A good case study is the much vaunted Zircon hypersonic cruise missile, one of Putin’s six ‘superweapons’ that he announced to the world in 2018.
The Zircon is hypersonic. Technically this merely means anything which travels faster than Mach 5, faster than five times the speed of sound: but there are weapons which do this – for instance normal nuclear ICBM warheads re-entering the atmosphere – which aren’t called ‘hypersonic’. Then, among hypersonics, there are various different things one might mean.
The Zircon is what’s known as a ‘hypersonic cruise’ missile. As a cruise missile it flies along within the atmosphere under propulsion for most or all of its flight: rather like a normal, subsonic missile like the famous US Tomahawk or Russian Kalibr. Both of these are essentially robotic jet aeroplanes on one-way missions, though some versions of Kalibr can go supersonic on rockets during their final run in to the target, to make them harder to shoot down.
Zircon is different. It doesn’t use a jet engine, nor even seemingly a ramjet: normal ramjets top out between Mach 3 and Mach 4. Zircon has a ‘scramjet’, a ramjet which can burn fuel inside itself in an air flow moving at supersonic speeds – a supersonic combustion ramjet. Getting one of these to work is traditionally described as ‘like trying to light a match in a hurricane’. It’s even harder if you don’t want to use troublesome hydrogen fuel, as you probably don’t want to. The scramjet permits the missile to fly at better than Mach 5 without using a rocket or leaving the atmosphere.
In theory then, we have a missile which could travel a very long way, staying low above the wave tops like a Tomahawk or a Kalibr, but enormously faster. That would, indeed, be a super weapon. But there are reasons to think that Zircon is not all that Putin cracked it up to be – and more reasons all the time, as it is now being used in the Ukraine war.
Even before the wider war in Ukraine, at nine metres long and 60cm around, rocket scientists and missile spotters were immediately sceptical about the Zircon’s claimed 1000 km range and a top speed of Mach 8. Physics trumps propaganda.
Additionally, 2023 RUSI analysis cast doubt over the pace of development. Supposedly, Zircon was first tested in 2015, had been fired ten times by 2018, was fired from a ship in 2020, from a submarine in 2021 and then was declared operational in 2022 – and all this with zero failures.
This would be very quick for even a regular boring missile, much less one as cutting edge as Zircon claims to be.
Actual data is hard to come by as usage has been low, perhaps as low as five times. The one occasion where there is solid evidence that Zircon had been used in anger in Ukraine, the missile wreckage was found in the vicinity of a non-military target – not something a super weapon would be aimed at – suggesting that the mighty Zircon either missed its target or was shot down.
Kinzhal, another member of Putin’s super six, has been used many times in Ukraine and so provides better data.
Kinzhal’s claimed top speed of Mach 7 (or perhaps Mach 10 after launch from a Russian jet itself moving at better than Mach 3) actually appears to be nearer Mach 5 – and this is during its high altitude phase. As Kinzhal descends towards its target it slows to ‘just’ Mach 1.9. This is a fairly normal missile or jet speed which is now well within the operating parameters of the famous American-made Patriot interceptor which has done well against Kinzhal many times.
It seems more than likely that Zircon’s hypersonic capability, if it is real, can only be achieved as in the case of the Kinzhal – at high altitudes, which it is probably required to reach to achieve long ranges. If employed as a low-flying classic cruise weapon, it is probably not all that much more dangerous than a terminally-supersonic Kalibr variant.
The other good news is that the more these fast moving threats are intercepted, the more informed the many algorithms required to do so become. There is no better equipment test environment than live operations.
One thing is clear: Kinzhal, and probably Zircon, are not the super-weapons that Putin said in 2018 “were impossible for America to intercept or defeat”.
Obviously as a former navy anti-air-warfare specialist I am most interested in weapons like Zircon (and Kinzhal) for what they could mean in the maritime environment – the more so as there’s a large fleet of US, British and other warships engaged in a shooting missile war right now, in the Red Sea.
So first, we see from Ukraine that Patriot can beat Kinzhal and – probably – Zircon. Then we need to remember that Patriot is not the best anti-air defence on offer: it is limited by what you can or would put on trucks.
American Standard Missiles (SMs) shot from Aegis warships are generally deemed to be much more capable than Patriot. SM-3s can bring down ballistic weapons soaring through space, or targets in low orbit. SM-2s are spec’d to deal with supersonic inbound threats like Kalibr and Kinzhal, and may well be able to deal with Zircon at shorter ranges. The new SM-6 is better still, and probably able to deal with such weapons in their hypersonic flight phases. The Aster missile of the Royal and French navies is in the same general class as these.
Western naval task forces have weapons which can defeat Putin’s super weapons, then. But there is still the matter of reaction times, should one be fired at you.
I wrote here a while ago that HMS Diamond and other ships operating at the bottom of the Red Sea have about a minute from detecting an Iranian anti-ship ballistic missile going ‘feet wet’ until it hits them. This means their decision window to decide and then fire back is in fact about thirty seconds. Something travelling at Mach 8, if it was flying low skimming the wave tops (as we have seen, Zircon probably can’t do this) might be picked up on a warship’s radar say 30 miles away: perhaps 18 seconds out.
This can lead to the assumption that no system (or at least not one with humans in it) can respond in time, once we’ve allowed some seconds for spilling tea, exclaiming rude words, interceptor launch and tip over etc. But, as ever, it’s not that simple.
Firstly, the chances are that the Vampire (that’s the brevity codeword for a hostile anti-ship missile) will have been detected some time beforehand by a friendly radar aircraft, high overhead and so able to see much further: perhaps an E-2 Hawkeye from a US carrier. There are other ways for a warship to know that such a threat is incoming before it actually appears above the radar horizon. In some cases it will be possible to shoot while the incoming missile is still below the horizon: the SM-6 has proven this in testing.
Then, moving missiles around ashore, either to a fixed launch site, on a mobile one or to a ship, submarine or aircraft that can fire them are all vulnerabilities – as is moving that platform into a position where it can fire.
Finding your target out at sea in order to shoot at it – locating and tracking a Western warship, or a selected merchant vessel – is not simple. Although it can be done by satellite in some circumstances, this is not as easy as Hollywood would have you believe. Many Houthi missiles simply fall into the sea, or hit ships they clearly weren’t intended to. Other methods of targeting are counter-detectable: a warship lit up by radar will be warned that trouble is coming and what direction it’s coming from.
Once fired, the system has to work in all conditions. Then it has to penetrate the layers of detection and defensive measures that the good guys (hopefully) have in place, ideally across a range of allied nations.
Then, the faster the missile travels the harder it is to knock down but then it’s also harder for the missile to communicate, use radar and therefore manoeuvre if you have moved, which in a ship, you will have done. At hypersonic velocity, a missile will be travelling inside a self-generated bubble of ionised plasma – as happens to a spacecraft during re-entry – cutting it off from all sensor and communication inputs. In such a flight regime, its chance of hitting a moving target is basically nil. This is probably why the Kinzhal (and almost certainly the Zircon) slow down in their terminal phase.
If all this sounds as if there are too many uncertainties to decide who wins in any given engagement then that is exactly the point. And this is before the ability to reload and sustain are factored in. There are people who work in highly secure secret facilities who do these sums for a living but even they are often working on incomplete data and assumptions and you won’t read their findings here.
In other words, the next time someone says that there is a new superweapon that renders vessel x, y or z redundant, treat that information with caution: as Putin has learned with Kinzhal in Ukraine, and is probably learning with Zircon also.
‘Does it work in the lab’, ‘does it work in test conditions’, ‘does it work in real-world conditions’ (i.e. rubbish weather, heat, cold etc) and ‘does it work when someone is shooting back’ all provide different outcomes, but it’s surprising how often people jump from lab announcement (exaggerated) straight to “warships or submarines or aircraft carriers are now redundant”.
So the cat and mouse continues. Is Zircon an undefeatable superweapon: no. Is learning how to counter it difficult, yes. Will building our own hypersonic equivalent take time and consume resources, yes…lots.
For all the talk of superweapons, remember that today Russia is having to put concrete barges in place across the entrance to the Novorossiysk docks in the eastern Black Sea to stop Ukrainian Magura V5s – basically robotised speedboats – from entering it and destroying yet more of the Black Sea fleet. This is what ‘real-world effective’ vs ‘spec sheet super’ looks like. Logistics, training, daring, bravery and ingenuity still count for more in warfare than capabilities on paper.
Tom Sharpe is a former Royal Navy officer. He commanded various warships, including a surface combatant, and specialised in anti-air warfare
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