Probability of Russian Anti-Ship missiles to hit/destroy an AEGIS equipped target

IronsightSniper wrote:By the way, I am curious if the Iskander could be utilized for an Anti-Shipping role? The high speed, accuracy, interception prevention would make the Iskander a pretty damn deadly AShM.

Austin wrote:

IronsightSniper wrote:By the way, I am curious if the Iskander could be utilized for an Anti-Shipping role? The high speed, accuracy, interception prevention would make the Iskander a pretty damn deadly AShM.

With the right seeker they can develop a Anti-Ship Ballistic Missile which as you know are quite in the news these days , but I am not sure if Russia would need that as they have many capable anti-ship missile

Easy? Really? Lets assume it performs a snake like manoeuvre just before impact, is it still easy to intercept? Travelling at mach 5, lets put some bones on this, at 320m/s for Mach 1 then mach 5 means it is travelling at 1.6km/s so even quite a fast missile will have an aim point well ahead of the target. A slight turn of maybe 5 degrees could shift the impact point by hundreds of metres. I would want to see it actually hit a diving mach 5 manoeuvring target before I gave it a pass. Remember each Backfire could carry up to 10 Kh-15s (with 6 in an internal rotary bay and 4 on external hardpoints).

Of course the SEA RAM was designed when the Kh-15 was known about so it is possible it could get a hit.

This is war, not a movie. I rather doubt the US will hold back from using nuclear weapons at sea either. Morality has nothing to do with it, it is the winner that sets the morals. The US won in the pacific in WWII so the attack on Pearl Harbour will live in infamy. If Japan had won it would have been pre-emptive self defence that was fully justified.

But that is the point, there is no single missile or weapon that can reliably defeat an air defence system. You need a variety of effective missiles and the platforms to deliver those missiles in large quantities. Granits would be useless to most countries without Kirovs, Kuznetsovs, and Oscars. They operate best as a pack.
Yakhont and Onyx and Brahmos have similar software though they are smaller to allow use from smaller platforms. They are not Harpoon size, but instead of backfire size aircraft you can use Flanker sized aircraft... which multiplies the number you should be able to get on target.

Stealth is supposed to work for the Klub up until it gets to about 30-40km from the target where it drops down and accelerates to very high speed to breach the inner defences.

Spammed? Radar signals from AEGIS will enable attacking missiles to operate in a completely passive mode during the attack the greatest advantage a carrier group has is its mobility and keeping quiet about its position.

And every enemy launch platform in the area will detect those radars.

The IR signature against a cold sea will always be a problem for any missile with a jet engine... the difference is that with a Harpoon you have about 30 seconds from detection to impact while with a Club you might get 10 seconds.

What you are suggesting has a lot of merit, but I think the technology will filter through the various systems and that the hypersonic Brahmos II will likely have the speed and manoeuvre capabilities of the Iskander.

There was some talk of many of the Granits not carrying warheads but carrying onboard jammers and decoys and other things to effect the defence. Even a load of corner reflectors and thermal flares could make the work of spotting the targets much harder. A sensitive proximity fuse and some side thrusters to dodge incoming missiles could be an option too. The original Granits had Titanium shields to protect their warheads from external explosions because the best way to shoot down a Granit is to make its warhead explode. The shields were added to make it very hard to make the warhead explode prematurely without increasing weight too much, but those missiles with flares and decoys without warheads would actually be rather hard to bring down because even when riddled with fragments it would continue on its trajectory and might possibly hit the ship anyway with 3-4 tons of metal at mach 2.5.

Actually the supersonic Klub is a solid rocket fueled terminal stage weapon and being visible is not the same as being easy to shoot down. The SR-71 was very easy to see, you would need specific tools to defeat it like S-300 or Mig-31s.

If a carrier group is going to sail around with its radars scanning the horizon for Klubs it can expect a lot of attention from radar silent passive radar homing anti ship missiles.

If the SEA RAM system is not turned on it will take about 2 minutes to turn it on and prepare it for engaging targets. Anything radar guided will take maybe 5 minutes.

Equally you are assuming the attack will take place in open water and the conditions will be perfect. What about heavy sea fog, sea state 3-4 at night during a shift change on watch?

The Russian solution to good carrier defences is speed and numbers. The Klub can be torpedo tube launched, land launched, sea launched, and air launched. A flanker can carry about 3 Klubs and a Mig-29 should be able to manage at least 2. A Bear and Backfire should be able to carry quite a lot each too.

When it comes down to it, most Russian AShMs aren't that different from each other to counter. Either it climbs up and dives on it's target, climbs up, cruises, drops down, cruises to target, or just a cruise at low altitude.

Which model SM-2 can engage a missile sized target at 40,000m or something like 130,000ft altitude?
More importantly which model could do it in the 1980s when the missile became operational?

For an attacker to toss around nuclear armed missiles makes sense because it is just his missiles there and he is safe well away from the mushroom clouds. For a defender to start tossing around nuke armed missiles then the problem becomes... what happens when you fire a missile at a missile heading at you but where your missile is going to intercept the missile coming at you is the carrier you are supposed to be defending and your missile detonating above it might do more damage to it than the missiles you intercept. There is also the problem of multiple nuclear explosions around the place suddenly render you IR and radar equipment rather less effective in spotting targets. With Glonass built in the incoming missiles could easily determine the coordinates of targets scanned by radar from space or by another missile in the attack pack so when their radars stop working because all the nukes have ionised the air they can still fly on intertial nav to where the target could be and explode their nukes with a fairly good chance of success.

They have the range of flying very low (3m for Uran to under 7m for Moskit and 10m for Granit) very high (up to 40km altitude for AS-15) with a speed range of mach 0.8 for Uran, 1.8-2.0 for Granit, 2.2 for Moskit, 2.9 for the supersonic Klub, and Mach 5 for AS-15.

I would say they have rather more variety in flight profile, attack profile, and attack speed than the US options of Tomahawk and Harpoon, both of which are low level cruisers at about mach 0.8 with the option of staying low or a small climb just before impact and vertical dive to impact.

Indeed, but over those last 10-20km most targets could be detected so covering those last few tens of kms as fast as possible limits interception time and maximises impact performance. (the impact energy is the velocity squared times mass)
Even a missile travelling at 800km/h will likely be a significant IR target compared to the temperature of the sea.

More related to EMCON because a carrier group scanning the radar horizon for low flying high speed incoming threats also broadcasts its presence to most of the ocean the vessel is sailing in. As a general rule of thumb a radar seeker looking for an emitting radar signal can generally detect a radar at 3 times the distance that same radar could detect a platform looking for it. And that doesn't take into account the radar horizon, so a big powerful radar that can spot aircraft at 400km (at high altitudes) could be detected at 1,200km or more by an elint aircraft.

If US warships did emit radar all the time then the Russians wouldn't need the Liana series satellites.

A platform like an OSCAR II detects emissions from a US carrier group will immediately contact HQ via satellite link and all Soviet assets in the area would coordinate an attack based on the signal strength and direction of the emissions. When your missile has a range of 700km the target is probably in range.

For most of the 1980s and the early 1990s an AEGIS class ship could detect supersonic targets 4.5m off the water, but couldn't actually do very much about them as the Standard SM-2 could not engage targets below 7m because of their proximity fuse and the software and missile design.

On paper the Exocet should not have been a problem for the British in the Falklands war. They had missiles that should have been able to deal with them. The British had Exocets in service themselves!

The Brahmos is a modified Yakhont, externally they are rather similar. Most previous Soviet antiship missiles were rather larger than the Brahmos, so if they decided to adopt the Brahmos they would probably be able to significantly increase the number of missiles carried per platform.... for instance after dragging around the almost 6 ton Kh-22M the Backfire could probably carry two Brahmos missiles for each Kh-22M it could carry. It could carry a max of 3 Kh-22Ms so that would mean the 2.5 ton Brahmos should be able to be carried at a rate of two per wing hardpoint and probably a single weapon under the engine trunk positions allowing 6 missiles to be carried over shorter ranges. Well... 6 x 2.5 = 18 tons and the Backfire can carry 24 tons when fuel load is reduced so that would be a potentially realistic load.
If it carried one under each external position that would mean 4 missiles carried with plenty of weight capacity for the internal rotary bay to carry more missiles like AS-15s.

I disagree as the nose will contain the radar and guidance stuff, and behind that will be the warhead with the armour, so to get to the fuel, which is actually a liquid for Granit, which uses turbojet propulsion. The Onyx which is its replacement uses a ramjet... also liquid fuelled.
BTW Phalanx is only fitted with DU rounds which would not be very efficient to ingite either solid or liquid fuel. Equally by the time it is near the target ships defences the fuel tank will almost be empty and if I know the Soviets they will have pumped cooled fumes from the engine into the tanks to pressurise fuel flow but also remove all the oxygen to prevent fuel explosions.

As far as I know the Klub will be the standard vertical launch antiship missile for Russias conventional subs. The subsonic version will be for land attack use, while the supersonic model is for anti ship use mainly.

It will attract enemy fire like walking upright and out in the open with a flamethrower tank on your back in Iwo Jima would.

The battle groups best chance of survival is to be hard to find. Blasing away with your radars 24/7 is the opposite of that.

Do you think the person firing antiship missiles is the attacker or the defender?
Has to be the attacker right?
It is completely up to the attacker as to whether they attack or not.
It is also up to the attacker what sort of attack will be used and when.

The attacker might decide to fire an anti ship missile at the carrier group every hour and a half... 24 hours a day for 6 days. Such an attack rate would be straight forward to implement if you have air power in the region and a safe place to launch from. After 2 days of high stress and little real sleep the attacker might decide to suddenly launch 100 missiles at the group all arriving from different directions at about the same time. After monitoring the US Navy for 60 odd years they might have noticed certain regular procedures or patterns, like refuelling at sea etc where part of the fleet is not at its most ready and during such periods an attack has more chance of success... just as an example.
The attack will use any situation to make their attack more likely to succeed.

BTW the higher the sea state the higher the anti ship missile flys... remember its height is measured above the wavetops so high sea states are no risk to the missiles but in anything more than a sea state of 5 most weapon systems suddenly become ineffective. Sea spray over the deck make IR sensors pretty useless too.
High sea states also mean that even trivial damage can become much more life threatening.

SM-3 has no experience against a manouvering target and has only been used against a non manouvering satellite whose trajectory was fixed and known in advance.
How many SM-3s are operational on US vessels and how many other navies have it?

How long does it take from detection to launch?

In the last gulf conflict a UK destroyer shot down a Silkworm anti ship missile with a SAM. It took 90 seconds from detection to interception. A supersonic Russian Anti ship missile would have taken less than that time from detection to impact by your own calculations.

You think a conflict between Russian platforms and AEGIS class cruisers would not go nuclear very quickly? 25% of all Soviet Anti ship missiles were nuclear armed, do you think the Russian navy will not do the same? (Note the Russian navy is introducing the Kh-101/102 nuclear and conventional cruise missiles back into operation so one expects it will do the same across the board to compensate for the overwhelming advantage in numbers that NATO currently enjoys).

I have ignored the use of mines and torpedoes.
Something you are ignoring is that most countries don't have defences as good as a US carrier group so against those sorts of threats the variety of Russian systems is overkill.
The reality is that if Russian antiship missiles fail to defeat US carrier groups it really doesn't matter because those TOPOL-Ms will be trashing US cities in 30 minutes and Minutemen will be doing the same to Russian cities not long after.

After a period of 15 or so years starved of funding the Russian options for destroying surface vessels is still formidable and while US defences have greatly improved over the last decade and a half they still do not offer 100% protection from what the Russians have now. Once they have worked on Brahmos II with a supersonic combustion ramjet engine (ie scramjet) and mach 6-8 speeds for an air breathing manoeuvring missile threat suddenly raises the bar even more.
The game of measure and countermeasure is never ending.

Detection is only the first step. You need to determine course and speed. Identify the target as hostile. Activate the defence system. Allocate a weapon to engage. Get senior officers permission to fire. ...and Fire.

In an ideal world they should hit it every time.

Few navies operate in an ideal world.

I hope you will understand if I strongly disagree with that.

The greatest danger to a CBG is a coordinated attack from a lot of platforms by a large number of missiles at once. The best way to ensure the enemy knows where you are and can plan such an attack is to broadcast your position to everyone by radiating.
You are a carrier group... use AWACs for looking for targets and threats.
AWACS emissions tell the enemy you are there but don't show where the AEGIS class cruisers or the carrier itself is.

Even one Oscar carries 24 missiles... that is a fairly potent attack for any target short of a carrier group. The Yakhont and Brahmos can be air launched from Flankers and they have a few of those and are getting more.
The withdrawal of the F-14s and their Phoenix missiles has reduced the CAP reach of US carriers, so Tu-22M3s become more potent.

Actually I would say the opposite, Iskander missiles are trickling into service at a fairly slow rate. Production facilities for Brahmos have been set up in Russia and in India and GLONASS receiver chips have been integrated into the Brahmos design already. The Iskander is a ground launched solid fuelled rocket with a launch weight of almost 4 tons and a range of 280km. Yakhont/Brahmos in the air launched version has a range that is similar but weighs 1.5 tons less. Being liquid fuelled the Yakhont/Brahmos could easily have its range extended with 500kgs more fuel, but the promise of scramjet propulsion is even more enticing and will likely make doubling or even tripling the range of the missile straight forward.
A jet engine means that the flight path and manoeuvring can be made more efficient because the engine can be throttled.
(an example is a house brick with a rocket engine where the rocket burns for x amount of time and puts x amount of force on the brick. The brick will have an aerodynamic speed where it will cruise well, but a rocket will simply push for a period and then stop. A jet engine can apply force more efficiently and this means the brick will travel much further though slower.)

That is the logic that led someone to suggest getting the makers of the TOPOL to make a solid fuel missile for SSBNs that had never made SLBMs before and had no experience in that role designing the Bulava.

Not sure I have ever seen a solid fuelled turbojet before. Onyx (and Vulkan and Moskit) are next in the family tree... why shouldn't we mention it/them?

Unless there is a serious structural failure that destroys the missile I rather doubt fuel leaking from holes in the fuel tank will burn like a hollywood bad guys car while it is travelling at almost mach 2. Sure there is lots of oxygen at that altitude but supersonic combustion is a tricky thing to get going let alone get it to explode.

Assuming it flys straight in to the side of the ship then it would have to be well within the minimum range of phalanx to count as a side shot... if the Granit explodes within 300m then the warhead alone will do serious damage to the ship anyway, and even if you slash the sides of the Granit within 200m it will be travelling with enough momentum that it will hit the ship no matter what you do to it the explosion will do serious damage anyway.
In actual practise the Granit will be turning as it arrives and remember a side shot at something travelling 800m/s that is 300m away means almost aiming at the ship you are supposed to be protecting.

It can still be considered new because the Russians haven't been buying new stuff for the last two decades or so. As they buy new stuff and update their older stuff you will find they have plenty of what they think they need.

I can tell you that if the upgrades of the Kuznetsov goes through then that is 12 less Granits, but if the three remaining Kirovs get upgrades then the potential for large anti ship missiles becomes immense... plus the three Akula (Nato TYPHOON) class subs getting fitted out with all new gear that could be SSGN orientated or it could become some sort of arsenal underwater vessel... or they might make them research vessels with mini subs for rescue and research...( which means naval spetsnaz delivery vessel.)

The USN disagrees with you. Having certain radars on makes sense but not all and not all the time. Radars can also operate in a listening mode and if you have lots of very large radars listening that can link together you can get range information by triangulation totally passively without giving away your position.

Remember a SSN can use electronic emissions to find and attack CBGs too.

If they attack then the "attackers" have something they need to deal with. If the group goes home then the attackers can claim a win. Odds are that the president sent that CBG there for a reason... the attacker is hardly going to take on a US CBG for fun.

If the location is open ocean then locating the CBG is the attackers biggest problem.
In more limited waters like the Persian gulf then other aspects come in to play. To launch a strike the carrier assets have x range so plot that range from likely targets and you get areas to search and directions the attack can likely come from.
One way to deal with a CBG these days might simply be to take on the aircraft in the air group and use mines and coastal defences to keep the ships away.

The Kh-15 was designed as an anti radiation missile for the Tu-22M3 to allow it to fly through heavily defended airspace by taking out all the main radar bases and SAM sites.
The standard warhead was a 200Kt nuclear device.
The Anti ship model uses a conventional warhead and there is no reason to believe it doesn't manoeuvre during its descent. All the large anti ship missiles before and after it were designed to fly snake like turns during the terminal phase.
In fact in many ways the anti ship version of Kh-15 is very much like an air launched Iskander. Mach 5, 300km range, solid fuelled, it only weighs about 2 tons but then it is air launched which greatly reduces the requirement for fuel weight to get the missile moving.

I didn't tell you, I asked you a question whose answer you knew to remind you of the figure you calculated because that number is interesting compared to the real world example I gave.

I think it is rather useless to compare a single AShM with the air defence of an entire CBG. Anyone wanting to attack will not sail up to a CBG and fire a single missile of any kind and expect it to succeed.
These missiles were designed with AEGIS in mind but were never intended to be fed to the AEGIS cruisers one at a time. There is a reason the Oscar class subs carry 24 Granits. There is a reason why Granits have datalinks that allow multiple missiles share information and pass that information to satellites and other platforms.

There is a reason AEGIS is designed to handle lots of contacts at once, but then in a busy shipping lane with lots of commercial shipping present it can't just blaze away at everything it detects either.

Experience in the Falklands show that sometimes ships need to operate near islands and with other less well protected vessels and that even if your AEGIS destroy can decoy away some missiles, if those missiles hit the transport ship carrying all your tanks then the intervention force you are part of might have just failed.

That is funny. This thread is about the Iskander-E missile and I thought we started talking about using it as an antiship missile because all the other antiship missiles the Russians have are crap. I think keeping in perspective that not every naval target the Russians want to sink is a USN CBG that most of their missiles will do fine and there is no need to convert the Iskander into a naval weapon afterall.

Only when there is a perceived threat. Also it will rarely be set to open fire on its own due to the risk that it might start opening fire on friendlies (like the returning ships helo). Also Phalanx is useless against supersonic sea skimming missiles.

Can be calculated in seconds for a ballistic or non manouvering target. Has to be calculated in real time for manoeuvring targets.

Really?

Wonder why they are spending money on the RIM-174 Standard ERAM (SM-6), an upgraded version of the SM-2 under development designed to target both aircraft and high performance cruise missiles .
Afterall if existing Standard missiles can already engage high speed low flying missiles what need is there for RIM-174?

A system that works only in a perfect world is not much good to anyone. That is why the Russians intend to fire off lots of missiles at targets like CBG. They might fire a single missile at a lower value target, but for most high value well defended targets they will launch as many as they can.

Can optical satellites see through cloud?
The problem with optical satellites is that there are millions of ships at sea at any one time... probably hundreds of millions actually. You can either scan large areas with low detail or you can zoom right in so you can ID a target... in which case it will be like looking for a carrier through a straw.
Computers and software can speed things up, but they can't make clouds invisible.
The other problem of course is that in a real conflict how many satellites will remain operational?

According to wiki (not the best source I know) they have 5 operational Oscar and Oscar II subs.
They don't need to engage every US carrier battle group... just the ones near their country. And Flankers can carry 3 Klubs and Backfires can carry 10 missiles per aircraft. Is that enough?

No. The USN actually tested Phalanx against very low flying missiles and it failed because of radar returns from the sea surface. They put an IR system for aiming at very low flying targets to solve the problem. However when they tested it against very low flying very fast targets they found that it was ineffective and so they developed SEA RAM to replace phalanx.

Sizzler might be overhyped soviet crap but the people talking it up the most are the USN.

Development of the Brahmos makes sense. It is already faster than Moskit and with a scramjet engine instead of a ramjet engine would make speeds of mach 6-8 possible with the ability to throttle and manoeuvre.

The Russian army will likely continue work on Iskander too and if a European BM shield is built without their participation I could see Russia withdrawing from the INF treaty to allow longer range ballistic missiles to be developed.

No, you are suggesting naval use of an army weapon. The makers of Iskander also make anti tank missiles and Iglas. Now they might have some experience in navalising their weapons... SHTURM and ATAKA are fitted to some small patrol craft and Igla is certainly used at sea as well, but the point I am raising is that assuming that a land based system can be navalised easily can be a mistake.

I thought we were comparing a potential naval Iskander with currently used equivelents. That would have to include all of the currently available missiles wouldn't it?

The DU rounds the Phalanx fires would rapidly ignite material if the target were stationary. You couldn't start a fire with a blowtorch if you were trying in a wind blowing at mach 2. Equally a fire isn't enough... it would quickly blow out. You would need a suddenly large volume of oxygen in the fuel tank to get an explosion. In the 2 seconds a mach 2 missile is within firing range of a Phalanx I just don't think it is possible.

The Russians are not stupid, the armour is specifically designed to stop the few rounds that might actually hit the missile in the last 2 seconds before impact. The entire purpose was the DU shells from a 20mm cannon. The combination of speed, moderate manoeuvre, and armour renders the Phalanx useless. Goalkeeper fires a heavier round out to longer range and might have a better chance, and there are other defence systems that might do better... like KASHTAN-M with its two 30mm gatlings and missiles, but the current standard will be missiles to defeat Granit like targets.

A nice 45 degree dive makes it a much easier target because it can be detected from much further out and there is no interference from the sea surface... and of course the Vandal target the USN uses has no armour and does not manoevre.

The Granit can go low all the way to target.

Only two countries in the world with satellites capable of reliably tracking surface vessels and one of them is the US. Considering the state of the Russian navy it makes sense for the USN to go around not broadcasting its presence till it wants to.
The idea is that the carrier just turns up offshore in a trouble spot to sabre rattle. Being able to track it is the first step in being able to defeat it so why give everyone that first step?

I am sorry but just looking at one missile and one AEGIS vessel is not very practical or interesting to me. Perhaps we should just end the discussion here?

The Russians will not use one missile and AEGIS is not designed to stop one missile. They weren't designed in a vacuum and they weren't meant to be used that way either.

The whole purpose of a carrier group is to have multiple platforms that support an airgroup. The aircraft contribute to the defence and form the main attack component as does the AEGIS ships (with SAMs and LACMs respectively) and SSNs that operate with them.