US Air-to-Air Missiles

A MiG-31 type aircraft is important for a missile like Kinzhal or even R-33 or R-37 because they are solid rocket motor weapons... the higher and faster you can launch them the faster and further they go.

With a scramjet powered missile high flight speed for launch is not so critical, though obviously a higher altitude launch is still a very good thing.

A scramjet can efficiently use its thrust level and fuel burn rate to efficiently accelerate to high speed and higher altitude without wasting energy.

Very simply an Iskander launched from the ground uses maximum thrust at lift off because it needs to overcome gravity and a thick atmosphere, but that thick atmosphere also limits the top speed the missile can fly at so it will try to climb as fast as it can because the faster it can get higher up into the air the faster it can go.

A civilian airliner flying at 10km altitude can fly 800-850km/h without using full thrust settings. When taking off there is no way it could fly that fast at low altitude because the air is thicker and it would need more thrust to push through the air.

A sidewinder missile is a mach 2.5 missile when launched at altitude, but at very low altitude it does not reach such speeds and its effective flight range is much much shorter. (it is the same for all air to air missiles of course that are rocket powered.)

The point is that at sea level an Iskander or Kinzhal will only fly at maybe mach 3 or mach 4, but if it climbs and reaches altitude it can be moving at mach 6 to mach 7 in the case of the Iskander and 8-9 with the Kinzhal. That extra speed and the fact that it is already in the air and moving means the Kinzhal can reach three times further than an Iskander because it can use that extra energy to climb even higher where the air is thinner and it flys more efficiently... and when it approaches the target it can recover the energy used to gain height by diving on the target and accelerating under the force of gravity.

What I am trying to say is that for rocket powered missiles the only in service option for the Americans would be their B-52s, though their B-1Bs could be modified to be a sort of a Backfire like platform... but they keep talking about retiring it too.

Their B-52s launched their X-15s and a few other systems... being subsonic is not an issue... just stick a huge solid propellant rocket stage on the weapon you are using and you can get 18km altitude launches and mach 2.5 flight speeds that way.

They likely got the 200 mile range from the ship launched model that has an enormous solid rocket booster attached to it.

That solid rocket motor lifts the missile out of its launch tube and accelerates it up into the air and up to rather high speed before it burns out.

I rather suspect that the solid rocket motor lifts the missile to a higher flight altitude and a much higher flight speed than any US aircraft could manage while armed with the missile without the solid rocket booster, so the range for the air launched model wont be anything like the range for the ground launched model.

As I mentioned the Kinzhal and the Iskander are similar to the same missile but both are single stage missiles.

The Iskander launched from the ground has to overcome its own inertia and climb from zero speed and zero altitude and it weighs almost 4 tons.... that needs a lot of energy lifting that up into the air and accelerating it to high speed.

The Kinzhal, of a similar weight and with the same rocket fuel is launched from 12-18km up in the air, so well above the thick low altitude air and up where the air is thin and cold. It will also be moving at supersonic speeds when it is released... perhaps up to mach 2.5...

So in terms of performance the Kinzhal is the equivalent of an Iskander with an extra large solid rocket booster that can lift the whole missile up into the air to 18km and mach 2.5 before the main rocket motor on the Iskander even lights up, which means all the engine power of the Iskander no longer has to lift and accelerate the missile off the ground, it can accelerate itself to an even higher altitude and higher flight speed than it could have achieved from that ground launch.

With this American missile the situation is reversed so instead of taking the original Iskanders range and times it by four to go from 500km to 2,000km range as you would if you put a huge solid rocket extra stage on an Iskander, you are actually removing the solid rocket stage and using an aircraft.

This means you if you can find a target you can move the launch platform much closer to the target much faster, but I don't think their fighter aircraft can accelerate to the speeds the original solid rocket booster managed, nor would they be able to climb to the altitudes they would have reached when they burned out meaning the range of the missile from a ship launch will likely be rather bigger than the range of the missile launch from an aircraft.

BTW I have always thought that the S-350 missiles would be good candidates for aircraft use... they are long and slim and have active radar homing so they would be fire and forget. They don't have big fins sticking out everywhere and the smaller missile has a ground launch range of about 50km and the larger of the two missiles has a ground launch range of about 120km.

Air launched from 10km or higher and a flight speed of mach 1 plus and you should be able to at least double their flight range and they are modern capable missiles ready to go.

Of course the R-77 still has growth potential and an air launched S-500 or S-550 would be interesting ABM weapons and satellite killers respectively.