Silo based SAMS

Instead of trucking surface to air missiles about the countryside would it be worthwhile to base them in cheap silos like mini ICBMs in secure interior areas? The rockets could be launched remotely by the IADS and could be more secure against surprise air attack than trucks in garages, assuming they could be made secure against sabotage and special forces.

For airport protection, it will be very good. You can pack more missiles, more radar around and secure your crew so that they are not afraid of being killed by anti radiation missiles inside of their radar trucks.

Of course I would keep some mobile SAM to surprise enemy because he will know where the static SAMs are.

I also submited the idea of puting pantsirs on a big static mast remotly controled to achieve longer ranges against low flying missiles.

All that controled from a bunker hiden 150m under the ground.

Swede55 wrote:Instead of trucking surface to air missiles about the countryside would it be worthwhile to base them in cheap silos like mini ICBMs in secure interior areas? The rockets could be launched remotely by the IADS and could be more secure against surprise air attack than trucks in garages, assuming they could be made secure against sabotage and special forces.

1.) This is the wrong forum to ask this question, and there's no reason to start a new thread to ask question that's probably already been answered or could be answered in the already existing relevant threads. There's a Strategic Rocket and Spaces forum for a reason.

2.) Silos were a good idea when the CEP accuracy of ballistic missiles were several kilometers wide, but now modern ballistic missiles are accurate within tens of meters, and in some cases (like Iskander) they're accurate within 2-5 meters. Because of the increased accuracy of modern missiles it makes way more sense to be able disguise yourself and hide, and have the mobility to drive several dozen kilometers away (in a unpredictable path and direction in disguise) from ground zero and launch your ICBM within the time of your enemy launching theirs prior to impact. There's always trucks on duty, in fact the vast majority of vehicles within the Topol-M convoy, have never been seen in photos or film by civilian eyes, besides theirs truck depots that are likely decoys manned by nobody.


Ok the relevant mod (GarryB, George1) should move these posts in to a relevant forum/thread.

I was writing about SAMs not ICBMs.

Swede55 wrote:Instead of trucking surface to air missiles about the countryside would it be worthwhile to base them in cheap silos like mini ICBMs in secure interior areas? The rockets could be launched remotely by the IADS and could be more secure against surprise air attack than trucks in garages, assuming they could be made secure against sabotage and special forces.

There is no such thing as 'cheap silos'. They're quite expensive to build and even more expensive to maintain.

Why use static silo-based air-defenses when you can have mobile containers filled with air-defense missiles? For example, Tor M2 vehicle has a surface area of around 25ish square meters. The missile containers themselves are relatively small. The container for 4 of which is no more than 1.5 meters in width and at most half a meter in length. Which means in a standard shipping container you could fit no less than 15 of them = 60 missiles.

Though obviously that is not an optimal solution. Otherwise it would have already been implemented as it is not very expensive to do so. Why this was done is left to senseless pondering.

I don't think there's a way a silo could be that cheap, or they're less vulnerable than trucks in garages, and already exists ABM In silos,
But I think there is place for Sam with less mobility like iron dome, or morphey(at least the way I imagine it to be) if it still is a thing.
Lots of short range missiles to defend important sites like ICBM sites, nuclear power plants etc...

By silo I mean drill a hole in the ground, slip in a SAM in a launch container, wired to open the flap and fire remotely. It would need only to be hardened against rain and groundwater.

Place the containers 100+ meters apart with 20+ decoy lids each.

Copy naval systems, like Redut. Would be worthwhile around large fixed installations - airfields, harbors, long-range radars. Add a few Pantsir-M systems. In this way you would have a lot of ready to fire missiles with a small amount of manpower. You could also add a few fake systems (or empty silos).

To what purpose?

Currently an S-300 or S-350 or S-400 battery is mobile and can be moved to where it is needed, but it can also have jammers and decoys located with it in addition to TOR and Pantsir systems also defending it from attack... and the whole thing is mobile so you can move then around the place depending upon where you need them.

Equally you can build fake models that you can also set up around fake targets that the enemy can attack all they want.

Even if you just use a post hole digger and drop a missile in there you are going to need cabling so the missile tubes are powered and can receive target data for launching... that is a lot of cabling to empty tubes to make them seem real too...

I am not understanding the pay off... the value of these missile silos on land.

On ships it is an efficient way of storing and launching missiles compared with an ammo handling system and single arm launcher set up on older missile systems, which took up lots of space inside the ship.... vertical launch tubes are much more efficient, but then vertical launch tubes on a land based vehicle is also more efficient too.

With a missile like TOR or Tunguska with original missile ranges of 12km and 8km respectively, if you are locating these weapons on a large air base where the runway might be 5km long you are going to need several systems around the place to fully protect it from a range of threats.

Missiles dug in to the ground would not be very flexible and would not be easy to reload.

An ICBM is safe in the silo from everything except a direct hit and as mentioned new missiles can manage that direct hit... But... while silos are very expensive to build they are already built so keeping the ICBM in the silo makes a lot of sense because an S-500 missile and a TOR system missile together can intercept pretty much anything... from ICBM and SLBM warheads for S-500 and cruise missiles and precision ballistic missiles for TOR so nothing is likely to get within 8km of the ICBM silo without getting shot down and penetration performance on a silo is pathetic even with a nuke warhead without a direct hit...

Copy naval systems, like Redut. Would be worthwhile around large fixed installations - airfields, harbors, long-range radars. Add a few Pantsir-M systems. In this way you would have a lot of ready to fire missiles with a small amount of manpower. You could also add a few fake systems (or empty silos).

But it is cheaper and just more useful to put them on a truck or trailer that can be much more easily moved around the place.

You could dig a lot of trench holes around your airfield or base where a truck can reverse a trailer back down into the trench so that when it is parked in the trench you can't see the top of the trailer it is below ground level and therefore protected from small arms fire and fragments from exploding nearby weapons, but it can still launch its missiles vertically.

You could have 100 trenches around the base and maybe 20-30 trailers and maybe 4-5 trucks to move them around when needed.

Other trenches can be used for cover by any vehicles or people caught in the open during an attack... crew from aircraft can jump into them for safety for example.

Treat every large military installation like a ship. Why shouldn´t Engels have the same amount of air defence like Kuznetsov?

In fixed installations you can put 200, 300 missiles around a large airbase. Controlled by a handful of men. Your mobile systems could be spread more between the fixed installations. Or moved closer to endangered areas.

To carry the same amount of missiles like a VLS system you need a lot of trucks. It may be even cheaper to build a fixed installation instead of buying all the vehicles. The operation of a building with missiles will definitly be cheaper.

This is not either/or. There should be fixed air defence systems at all large, important military installations + mobile systems for the area around/inbetween.

I am honestly in favor of this plan.

In my case, i am more concerned with the Gap between alert and deployment, your system can be as mobile and versatile as you like, but if they can't make it in time, then it's all for nought.

We have to also take into account the Super-sonic and Hyper-sonic weaponry of the opponent in the near future.

Making the Silo's shouldn't too difficult, even a hardened one.
Decoys can just be a metal plate with some well place heating elements (ultra cheap).

One of the things that i am wondering is how hard they'll be to take out, since all guided missiles have a CEP of around 5-10 meters, if the Silo system is like a 4 cell Reduts, than even a deviation of 2 meter would be enough to prevent the systems destruction.

I don't propose running cabling to the decoy lids, or heating elements on them. Presumably the real missiles would be inactive with minimal if any electricity use, so they would be cold.

If some hardening is desirable, you could dig a hole, drop a length of pipe into the hole and then slip the missile container into the pipe. To reload, pull out the empty container and slip in a fresh one, this would require a suitable machine, of course.

On the one hand, yes for strategic locations like airfields a permanent installation could be easier to maintain/quicker reaction.
On the other the problem with fixed installations is that the enemy knows where they are & will definitely work to overwhelm or bypass them.

I forget which it was but one of the Arab-Israel wars (in 60s?) Syria had a powerful air-defense network setup (particularly in Bekaa valley) & had inflicted heavy losses in the previous war but against Soviet operation guidelines they were keeping static locations and got crippled in first wave -> Israel had complete air-superiority the rest of the war.
Soviet guidelines were something like there should be at least 4 firing locations per firing unit & should relocate to a random one every 2-3 days max.
(Russia either has fallen into the same lax attitude or assumes they won't actually be targeted in Syria -> has also been using static locations in current war)

Cheap decoy metal plates wouldn't work, US spy sats would detect that.
You would need to at least spend time digging holes & laying fake cable trenches (or make fake antenna with fake signals).

Above-ground boxes with soil berms would be a cheaper, somewhat protected version and could fairly cheaply build decoys.
(this is what US is doing with their AEGIS Ashore installations & apparently without decoys)

The view of spy sats during construction could be blocked by a large tent or canopy, and once a missile is installed, the canopy moved a short distance to the next adjacent construction site, some of the canopy supports wouldn't even need to be moved. The exact site of the real missile would be somewhere under the canopy. Assuming this would be worth the satellite time and attention.

I don't understand how a good decoy lid could be differentiated from the real one from a height of 100 miles.

You want flexibility as well as cheap... comparing it with a ship is a good example, but you do need to recognise that during peace time the enemy will have an enormous amount of time to watch and to notice things... if you have a long string of things in the ground and some are heated and have power cables running to them and some don't and they never change then they will work out that not all of them are operational.

You also don't need to worry about digging in missiles... actually open topped berms are actually superior... if you have long lines of dug in missile tubes a single ground burst nuke will cause the soil to shatter the missiles in their tubes... the empty tubes will just collapse... real ICBM missile silos are not just holes in the ground they are THOUSANDS of tons of steel reinforced concrete structures design to withstand enormous pressures from both above and beside to protect them from a nuclear attack... you would need a direct hit with a nuclear warhead to take out a silo but the silos are spaced apart so one hit will take out perhaps one or two missiles at most and the rest will survive and can be launched.

You can't just drill holes in the ground and place missiles like S-300 or whatever in there... you need power, you need drainage... what if it rains and it fills up with water and then freezes and thaws and freezes and thaws... that is how you turn granit into gravel...

A large base like Engels will have lots of built in infrastructure... power and communication cables dug into the ground and lots of redundant systems so one hit on a building will not blind or defeat the whole defence, but radars and sensors have places where they are more effective and places where they are not so effective... with a fixed site you can put them in optimum places and also work out potential attack strategies and place fake radars and radar emitters in various places too.

Then you look at places for missiles... from long range down to short range and everything in between.

Even old systems like SA-3 is good for shooting down threats like cruise missiles that really don't react to being attacked... why waste a brand new S-350 with ARH and high g flight capacity on a Tomahawk when a SA-8 or SA-3 would do the job?

You could set up fake buildings that offer shelter to these older weapons that could be rolled back in case of an attack and used to defend the base.

Newer systems have more and more ready to fire missiles that are also more capable and potent, so digging them into the ground does not really make much sense in my opinion. A few EMP weapon turrets and a large number of ground troops able to deal with sabotage and enemy special forces teams that might include robotics on both sides... I would make the IADS management underground and secure at the base but otherwise I would think it would be cheaper to locate mobile or shelterised versions of standard SAM systems that can be moved by a range of platforms... they don't need to be trucks... the two vehicle model of the TOR shows that you can plop a SAM system on a vehicle and the tow it into the arctic with is what is basically an upgraded mtlb manned vehicle.

On an air base you could tow around a trailer with dozens of TOR missiles behind a Typhoon or Boomerang armoured vehicle that is a TOR system itself... the trailer could just have stacks and stacks of TOR missile launchers all ready to fire up getting power and data from the TOR vehicle towing it.

Imagine a Boomerang vehicle with Pantsir... the rear trailer could be just 10,000 rounds of 30mm cannon ammo in two belts feeding through belt feeds directly into the rear of the Boomerang vehicle in front towing the trailer... the rear hull of the Boomerang Pantsir also filled with another 4,000 rounds and the turret containing the standard 2,000 rounds of 30mm cannon ammo so that one vehicle is moving around your air base with 16,000 rounds of 30mm cannon ammo ready to fire plus 18 ready to fire missiles.

Its partner vehicle has a 57mm cannon mounted on it with 300 rounds in its turret and another 600 rounds in the rear hull area normally used for a troop compartment and a trailer being towed with another 1,000 rounds for use against air targets and ground based special forces targets too... airburst for use against UAVs and incoming weapons... linked in to the local IADS network sharing target information and scanning for new targets to pass on to the network.

I don't understand how a good decoy lid could be differentiated from the real one from a height of 100 miles.

US satellites will be monitoring the area non stop all year round... if no one every walks near some of the tubes, and some tubes stay at a similar temperature and others do not and there is no cabling to the ones that don't heat up then you can assume either they are decoys or they are new and not connected yet.... but it does not matter... a decent high power weapon hits the ground there and they will be taken out anyway... the shaking of the ground would destroy the cabling and likely shatter the missiles in their tubes and the pressure wave rolls through.

This deployment would be vulnerable to nuclear attack, but in a nuclear exchange airfields and aircraft carriers would be nuked and SAMS would soon be of little use anyway. In a one sided nuclear war, the defender is screwed anyway. In a conventional war the whole area would have to be carpeted with explosives, easier said than done, especially if it is a considerable distance from the border.

I envision an array of missiles and decoys with shallowly buried cables, not just a line, and how would a trickle of electricity cause detectable heating? Buried water and oil pipes last for decades with little or no maintenance, if the bottom of the surrounding pipe was sealed, you would have a watertight cylinder that could withstand freezing and thawing cycles well enough. Put the launch container into that with a watertight ring placed between the top of the cylinder and the launch container. A small water pump might be needed.

Keeping such close watch on this deployment with satellites sounds expensive to me. Berms or trenches would be an improvement over garages, but are more conspicuous than holes in the ground with cammo lids. Buildings with roll top roofs could work, but you would have a lot of eggs in one basket.

Mobile missiles are fine once deployed, but that requires warning of danger followed by prompt action. Storing them in tunnels would be safer, where practical.

Well the defence of any fixed site needs to take in to account the fact that an attack might be anything from an innocent civilian protest, right through to WWIII full scale nuclear war but needs to be able to cope with anything in between.

Each level of threat requires certain capabilities... it is unreasonable to expect a base to defend itself from a full scale nuclear attack, but expecting it to deal with civilian protesters is pretty reasonable.

Fences and gates and cameras and a few guys around the place is often enough for stopping innocent people accidentaly wandering onto the property by accident.

Of course there are also the people who want to appear to be innocent who also want to wander onto the property and that can happen day or night.

Certain locations are small and might even be secret so having a lot of obvious security might reveal it in a way that less security might have been a better idea.

Military locations can have more aggressive and more impressive defences.

I think when you get to the point where you have fake buildings with SAMs built in is probably a waste of time... having open trench areas where you can drive vehicles down into them and park them so they are protected by the ground from ground based gunfire but can return fire makes a lot of sense and once you dig them you don't really need to do much to maintain them. Having large numbers around the place means an attacking enemy really will have trouble planning an attack because they really don't know what defences will be where.

If you can imagine planning an attack on a base on the top of a small hill surrounded by mountains in Afghanistan, if you watch and locate all the heavy weapons positions you might find a weak angle where there is not enough fire power directed there... or perhaps could land smoke rounds in front of the firing positions so they can't effectively engage you during your long vulnerable approach...

Just from this you can tell that base security could take up an entire website, but to be honest I really don't think Silo based SAMS would make sense.

Having said that they do have manned pill box type positions that contain a machine gun and a few rockets that can be located on the edges of the base that retracts down into the ground for protection from small arms fire that would be difficult to take out. You could network a few together that could provide good visibility of attacking forces and also suppressive fire against infantry and armour to blunt most attacks. From memory they were manned rather than unmanned but it would not take much to automate them I suspect.

Keeping such close watch on this deployment with satellites sounds expensive to me.

What else do you think they do with satellites? They take images over extended periods and then carefully examine the photos for details that show evidence of use or movement.

For instance they looked for roads in Siberia with large radius turns to determine which roads were being used to deliver large Rockets on trucks... and followed them to find Silos and ICBM fields.

Thermal cameras show heat and often energy sources too and also show patrol areas where guards tend to walk a lot and where they don't.

Photos taken at night show what is lit up on the base and what is not... which indicates activity... areas not well lit likely are not used at night.

Etc etc.

It is an entire field of science.

Berms or trenches would be an improvement over garages, but are more conspicuous than holes in the ground with cammo lids. Buildings with roll top roofs could work, but you would have a lot of eggs in one basket.

What I am saying is that if you have 50 vehicles on base then dig 200 or more positions for them so most positions will actually be empty and the attack force can't be sure of where anything will be... it also means they can move things around if they need to as well... the defenders will want all round defence and will normally focus their fire power in the direction the main attack is coming from, but if it turns out that is a bluff then they need to adjust their defences and redirect their fire power in other directions if it turns out the real attack is coming from some where else.... that is for ground attack or air attack or both.

Mobile missiles are fine once deployed, but that requires warning of danger followed by prompt action. Storing them in tunnels would be safer, where practical.

Well, no... any fixed base will have base security and might have some extra resources from the local forces during any sort of event, but they should have their own defence systems even if that is beefed up in an emergency.

An airfield might get some extra aircraft attached to it to increase its strength, but it will also probably get extra ground troops and air defence troops to support it too.

I think some buildings might be added for the air defence infrastructure because the base will never move, but the radar and missiles and other equipment like jammers and decoys will be in addition to this and need to be portable, which makes them more useful, more flexible, and just easier to reload and handle and support.

Keep in mind that in an IADS that even mobile vehicles are tied into the network, which means other SAM batteries and radar sites and HQs and Comms centres so they can't just roam around having fun... they would be attached to other forces like an airfield or a ground based army unit or the like.