New Russian Weapon Hides In Shipping Container

shmG writes "A Russian company is marketing a devastating new cruise missile system that can be hidden inside a shipping container, giving any merchant vessel the capability to wipe out an aircraft carrier. Potential customers for the formidable 'Club-K' system include Kremlin allies Iran and Venezuela, say defense experts. They worry that countries could pass on the satellite-guided missiles, which are very hard to detect, to terrorist groups. This is a scary new development in the global arms race that allows for the proliferation of cruise missiles to anyone who will pay for them — even terrorists. This could be the next big thing in strategic weapons, as they can appear anywhere there is a container ship. The company even made a commercial and posted it onto the Internet." The article notes that a Russian defense expert said that "as far as he understood, the Club-K was still at the concept stage."

Comments

Taking out capital ships?

[Carewolf]

I really hope a single cruise missile can't take out an aircraft carrier, if they can, then you have far bigger problems that missiles in merchant ships. They or their escorts should have the defenses to evade or destroy most missile types.

Re:Taking out capital ships?

[bertok]

I really hope a single cruise missile can't take out an aircraft carrier, if they can, then you have far bigger problems that missiles in merchant ships. They or their escorts should have the defenses to evade or destroy most missile types.

Precisely.

First of all, carriers are escored by... carrier battle groups!

The container ship would have to have a really good excuse for being anywhere near the group in the first place, and would then have to evade battleships on the way to the centre of the fleet where the carrier is, under the fire the whole way, and then the missile it launches will have to make it past the batteries of anti-missile systems like the Phalanx.

Err... no, this won't be taking down aircraft carriers any time soon.

What it could do however is allow the equivalent of guerrilla warfare on the high seas. Container ships could target cruise liners, merchant vessels, etc... and if nobody was around to see the attack, they might even make it away and claim innocence later. Even the survivors wouldn't see much, because it's fairly simple to attack "over the horizon".

Re:Taking out capital ships?

[AlecC]

While I agree that the defensive armament of a carrier battle group is intended to defend against precisely this sort of attack, the container ship would not have to be near: this sort of cruise missile typically has ranges of the order of 200 miles. You cannot enforce a 200 mile radius exclusion circle round your battle group. The missile will fly most of this distance at the height of a hundred or sofeet, so it is vulnerable only as it approaches the screening ships - which is why they are there.

Re:Taking out capital ships?

[GreatBunzinni]

Err... no, this won't be taking down aircraft carriers any time soon.

Indeed. You know what else will never happen any time soon? Taking down a brand new 1.1 Billion dollar guided missile destroyer with a mere rubber dinghy. That is a preposterous idea, isn't it? Perfectly impossible. If it's impossible for a diesel sub to make on your major carrier group then what are the odds for that to happen? Impossible, I say.

So, as you see, it's pretty reasonable to assume that a major threat that is capable of rendering one of your main branch of your armed forces completely useless is simply not a thread. Just dig your head into the sand and let's keep mindlessly hammering on the "we are invulnerable" mantra. That does wonders, all right.

Re:Taking out capital ships?

[MrAngryForNoReason]

Capital ships will simply have to maintain bigger distances. From the shore and from merchant ships.

Even what are classed as short range cruise missiles have a range of 100s of kilometres, long range missiles go up to and above 2500km range. It isn't really feasible to operate a carrier with the restraint of not going within 300km of shore or any commercial vessel.

A bigger problem is that due to the necessity of customs checking being on the shore, every American harbor has now become a launch site for Iranian missiles.

The containers being on shore is a complete non issue. The whole point is that the missiles are can be loaded on to and launched from any commercial ship that can carry a shipping container. If you were going to use it to blow up a port you wouldn't need a $10,000,000 missile delivery system you could just fill a container full of regular explosives.

The point of these weapons is that they can be transported and positioned for launch without being detected and that they are flexible so you can wither load it on a truck for land operations or on to a ship for a naval strike.

I don't really see a terrorist organisation bothering with something like this for most terrorist attacks a truck filled with explosives would do the same job a hell of a lot cheaper. Precision missile strikes aren't really necessary if you have suicide bomber willing to drive the truck right up to the target.

The danger would come nation states buying up a load of these and launching strikes from commercial ships during a conflict significantly blurring the lines between military and civilian vessels. Which would lead to a significant increase in civilian casualties due to civilian vessels being labeled as threats.

Re:Taking out capital ships?

[Shakrai]

They are a lot harder to sink than you might imagine. It's not that easy to sink a ship that displaces 100,000 tons, short of nuclear weapons. The real danger is in having them damaged to the point that they can't conduct air operations. That's as good as sinking them from a mission standpoint and much easier to achieve.

Re:Taking out capital ships?

[elrous0]

And I want to see a terrorist group that can afford 126 of these systems (not to mention the ship and trained personnel to actually operate the system), or a government that would go to that much effort just to take down a ship when conventional aircraft strikes would be much more efficient and effective.

Seriously, this is much ado about nothing. There are a multitude of powerful weapons that are way more portable than this (like Stringer missiles) that terrorists could potentially use but never have (unless you count the time we GAVE them Stingers). Even Iran isn't stupid enough to give these yahoos their top-grade stuff.

Re:Taking out capital ships?

[Rich0]

Sat guidance is only good for getting a missile to a particular absolute location on earth. Honestly, you can probably do this well enough with inertial guidance (ICBMs aren't sat-guided, and neither were a lot of earlier cruise missiles used by the US).

Hitting a ship with a missile involves a few problems.

1. Knowing where the ship is.
2. Getting the missile into the vicinity of the ship, close enough for the missile to find the ship with its onboard sensors.
3. Having the missile locate the ship's exact realtime location with its sensors.
4. Evading defenses at every step and actually hitting the thing.

Sat guidance solves #2 really well. A radar jamming system defeats #3.

Sat guidance alone can never eliminate the need to solve #3 in some way - a missile going mach 3 covers a huge space in one second, so unless the sat can give the missile realtime target location with a latency of much less than a second there is no hope of getting a hit. Every foot counts so even the accuracy of GPS might be a concern. Now, the ability to deliver realtime updates with a little more latency might allow the missile to close to a range where it could use IR to detect the ship and defeat radar jamming.

I think that the big problem is #1 - to even take a shot at a ship you need to know where it is in general, and in a serious shooting war between first world powers the first thing that would happen is that any satellite that even looks like a surveillance system would be shot down or at least blinded/jammed, and LEO will probably get so filled with debris that we won't be going into space for a few years except for short-term excursions which the military would be the only ones doing. Without satellites then air superiority or subs are the only way to find a target ship, and the US has a huge lead in both areas.

The world is being run by a pack of baboons

[Joce640k]

Is this a response to yesterday's story about the USA's dick-waving about building new missiles that can reach anywhere on Earth...?

Makes total sense for certain uses

[wvmarle]

Actually when I read this earlier in today's news paper I thought it makes total sense from a military/strategic point of view. And I was actually wondering why no-one else had thought of this before. Or maybe they are just not advertising it openly.

When it comes to transportation and handling of the equipment, a shipping container is great as it is standardised and fits easily on vessels, trains, trucks, and can be handled with standard lifting equipment.

The down side of course is the disappearance of the civil/military divide, which of course has already happened in many conflicts.

Simple resolution

[allcoolnameswheretak]

There is a simple resolution to this new weapon: countries known to be in the market for it will have their civilian merchant fleet classified as legitimate military targets.

Re:Simple resolution

[Jerrei]

Blowing up innocent people, that'll teach those damn terrorists!

Depends on the guidance system, I guess

[Bearhouse]

Unsophisticated missiles are not THAT hard to get a hold of already, ranging from Palestinian homebrews to enhanced Scuds.
But they don't have a great success rate, especially against military targets, and notably naval ones.
Exocets, on the other hand, do have a good success rate, and can be launched from improvised platforms, as proven by the Argentines during the Falklands conflict.
Whilst a major asset such as carrier is normally well-protected by a screen of other ships, it could be very vulnerable when in confined areas, such as the Straits of Hormuz...
Would the Russian Government be happy to hand-out weapons that could just as easily be used against them? Maybe not.
It's perhaps more likely that the Iranians will develop increasingly sophisticated weapons themselves. They're already quite well advanced...

More than that...

[OpenSourced]

Quite independently of whether that weapon is vaporware or not, the fact remains that advances in military hardware will end up percolating to the general public, if said public has enough money. What some years away were classified chips nowadays are available off-the-shelf. Guidance software, once leaked, is easy to copy. A disgruntled scientist is all that is needed to transfer loads of tech. Everybody keeps getting better at making things that fly. Look at the advance of the Chinese weaponry in the last years. They simply throw enough money at it, and they got mostly all the tech they needed. In some years, everybody and its dog will have enough firepower to down an aircraft carrier. I've seen posts saying that they should be able to block most missiles. Well, that's all right, except when you are faced with a hundred of them at the same time.

In a similar note, I'm not altogether sure that the recent move to the "non-nuclear ICBM" is a smart one. People are scared of using nuclear weapons, which is a sound attitude. That leads to treaties of non proliferation and generic agreement on not allowing the aforesaid proliferation. But that doesn't apply to other explosives, even if you are equally dead by a bullet than by a H-bomb. So what is now a cutting-edge technology (nnICBMs), will in ten years perhaps be available to mostly anybody in the world, and there is no non-proliferation treaty to pursue anybody for it.

Re:Containment

[vegiVamp]

> Yeah, war is bad, but why not take economic advantage / only take economic disadvantage from it?

It's called ethics, and I know for a fact that not all swedes lack that trait.

Re:Containment

[Caffinated]

The concern isn't that they're weapons as such, but that they're weapons designed to be hidden on merchant vessels. In a tense situation, it would likely make all merchant ships potential threats and would likely end up with a lot of innocent civilians being killed.

Re:Containment

[jedidiah]

> Why should they not sell them?

One word: Stinger.

It might sound like a nice payday but these things might end up pointed at YOU.

Nevermind the rest of the world, the Russians should be considering their own expanding frontiers here.

Re:Containment

[Eunuchswear]

Use of nukes would incite global retaliation.

Against whom? If Al-Queda let of a bomb in New York harbor who would you nuke? Saudi? Afghanistan?

Re:Containment

[daveywest]

Doesn't concealing weapons in civilian areas violate several international conventions and treaties? The only market for this device is terror based organizations.

Re:Containment

[tmosley]

It also makes aggression by big fat bullies less likely (think USA).

This is analogous to having civilians having concealed weapons. With concealed carry laws in Texas, violent crime has dropped significantly, even as it rises in other populous nations. With a weapon like this, wars are much less likely to break out.

This is sort of like a poor-man's nuke. No nuclear armed nation has ever been invaded (and only one has had a possession invaded--England). Maybe this sort of thing will stop us from invading any more countries using hair-brained justifications.