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India First To Build a Supersonic Cruise Missile
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt: "India successfully tested Sunday a 'maneuverable' version of the BrahMos supersonic cruise missile which it has jointly developed with Russia, news reports said. The vertical-launch version of the 290-kilometer range BrahMos was tested from a warship in the Bay of Bengal off India's eastern coast, the PTI news agency reported. 'The vertical-launch version of missile was launched at 11:30 (0600 GMT) hours today from Indian Navy ship INS Ranvir and it manoeuvred successfully hitting the target ship. It was a perfect hit and a perfect mission,' BrahMos aerospace chief A Sivathanu Pillai was quoted as saying. 'After today's test, India has become the first and only country in the world to have a manoeuvrable supersonic cruise missile in its inventory,' Pillai said."
This one is supersonic. Most others aren't, because it is not obvious what advantage supersonic cruise missiles have over ballistic ones.
BTW in the sixties the USA developed but never tested or deployed a nuclear powered supersonic cruise missile.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Riiight, because until today, they really weren't interested
If you're targeting ships, especially carriers, over water there isn't a lot of terrain to get in the way, and not too many people to hear the sonic boom. Carriers on the other hand, are generally the best protected ships in a fleet, with things like anti missile missiles and metalstorm batteries, not to mention other ships, to protect them.
If you're coming in towards a carrier, the faster you're going, the harder you are going to be to acquire as a target and then hit with defences.
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Isn't this just a really fast surface to surface missile? The operational range is 1/10 of a Tomahawk. How is this any different from a short range ballistics missile, other than the trajectory? I don't mean to criticize an impressive achievement but I foresee it being very different in use from something like a Tomahawk. A Tomahawk can be fired from a huge standoff range and hit its target. With this missile, the attacker has to get relatively close to its target, thus making it vulnerable to defenses. A big part of the value of a cruise missile is that the attacker can stay relatively safe. I think this weapon is much more defensive in nature and this is perhaps a reflection of India's strategic outlook.
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Actually, AFAIK the Bazalt is maneuverable only during its cruise phase, once it reaches the terminal guidance track and goes supersonic, it isn't really more than marginally guideable.
I'd guess that the Indian one is supersonic most of its range (thus the puny 300km) and will accept course guidance during supersonic flight.
So no, I'd guess that the title is only misleading, not grossly wrong as you imply.
-Styopa
The whole point of a 'Cruise Missile', is that it maneuvers... i.e it is not 'Ballistic'
I believe there were at least 14 models of Cruise Missiles before this that were SuperSonic.
Mod me 'redundant' again, and again...
Actually, the hardliners in the mid-east will consider nuclear because of Iran. Iran is not in the mid-east. Syria has an identity crisis coming. They are run by the Alawites (sp?) which are considered a branch of Shi'ism. However, the pop. is about 80% Sunni. The Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni gang, managed to get a foothold in Syria and Papa Assad leveled the city Hama, which the Muslim Brotherhood had taken over, in 1982. Then he invited the press in to get his point well made. Saudi Arabia and Egypt are mainly worried about Iran, Israel doesn't directly threaten them unless it is to get the rank and file Muslins upset and when they get upset, those governments get nervous. Jordan is caught between the Palestinians living within the country and the rest (more or less evenly divided or a 60-40 split but I cannot recall which has the edge). In any case, they aren't Shi'ite.
The main threat the Sunnis see is the Shi'ites. The U.S. fucked the Sunnis over royally by giving them the Shi'ites their first Arab country, Iraq, which could make a difference. Syria doesn't count because they will be hamstrung by their Sunni majority. And the Shi'ite in Iraq are one pissed off bunch. They've been screwed by the Sunnis under Saddam for 30 years. Then they got double crossed by the U.S. after the first Gulf War and Papa Bush encouraged them to rebell. They did, the U.S. didn't help. They got fucked.
The Iraqi religious (not the political) Shi'ite leadership, which al Sadr is not a member of (some wag called him the Al Sharpton of the Shi'ites), is not sympathetic to Iranian influence since they are mainly Arab and consider themselves THE Shi'ite authority. They are working behind the scenes to corral Iranian influence in Iraq. No one knows if the Iraqi Shi'ite religious leadership will prevail.
So right now, the Persian regime is promoting themselves as the Jew-Killers, the successor of the Nazies in an effort gain an edge over Sunni Islam. This is anathema to the Sunni who like dead Jews just as well as the next Muslim but would rather die than have Shi'ism become the dominant face of Islam. And Iran is in the ascendancy. It scares the heebie-jeebies out of the Sunnis and if Iran gets nukes, they will find a way to get them too.
The phalanx has been going away for decades. In fact, it was conceived as a stop-gap system that was only supposed to be around a few years because the Rolling Airframe Missile was (badly) late.
Personally, I don't see why something like Phalanx wouldn't be the right system to use against really fast missiles. The energy released when a DU bullet hits a missile coming in at mach 2.8 (or mach 5.2 for Brahmos II) must be absolutely enormous. Sure, you'll get crap all over the deck, but that's not the end of the world.
After 9/11 Iran was one of the few countries where candle light vigils were held to mourn the tragedy.
http://www.time.com/time/europe/photoessays/vigil/
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
The difficult situation humans face, IMHO, is that we have risen above "lesser" animals, and therefore our survival strategies, in that we have achieved self referencing consciousness and the ability to act based on abstract and irrational values rather than only survival strategies, but still have knee-jerk habitual patterns of fear of other and hyper self preservation. Oh and the newfangled ability to construct WMD. Exactly as Einstein said, we've left the cave in terms of ability to manipulate the outer environment, but haven't caught up in our value systems nor our maturity. Whether we just cannot see the forest for the trees and therefore even our modern abstractions of values and worldviews are extensions of the original survival of the fittest trait generation is to be seen but is perhaps irrelevant in that we now are capable of a conscious choice, irrational or not.
To choose to act toward the benefit of all mankind or even all sentient life may not seem rational in a closed system.
Like the prisoners dilemma, the issue is that the power to destroy is within reach of those who still have the fight and horde reaction of our ancestry.
There are reprogramming techniques that you mention: it's called Religion, Spiritualism and Philosophy; or perhaps just a damn EDUCATION as to the suffrage of our past - things not so heavily respected in consumer culture, and unfortunately when mentioned, the majority of these seem to have been created with and populated by people driven with the same motivations that lead to short term gains at the cost of long term evolution. Just my 2 cents. I'll go back to doing whatever stereotypical behavior that will marginalize my opinion.
What about those nifty anti-missile gatling guns on American ships? Can they or any other tech reliably intercept these things? I've seen the sentiment that America spending billions to build carriers may be foolish if a few $200,000 "Sizzler" missiles can take one out. I don't how severe that threat actually is but it is an argument I've seen either as the merits of a supersonic cruise missile or questionable investment in expensive capital ships vulnerable to them.
Torpedos hit submarines. When missiles try to hit submarines they explode on the surface. And it is a lot harder to go supersonic underwater (for two reasons).
Someone forgot about the ASROC and the SS-N-16. Both use Missiles to launch either a torpedo or a depth charge at an enemy ship or sub.
My mom (dead of pancreatic cancer this Christmas) worked at Boeing/SVS in Albuquerque and perhaps spoke too much of what they were doing there before she passed, bless her soul. I know a fair amount, for an amateur, about what our current and future projected capabilities are in regards to directed energy weapons. A supersonic standard cruise missile is a potential game changer, and I'll stand by that.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton