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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."
This threat must be contained
"The idea that you can hide a missile system in a box and drive it around without anyone knowing is pretty new," said Hewson, who is editor of Jane's Air-Launched Weapons.
"Nobody's ever done that before."
Most missiles on ships are.
Sure there are some that aren't but most of those are land based where conditions are a little more friendly.
Sure making it look like a shiping conatiner maybe new, but missiles in boxes is hardly cutting edge stuff.
Technology, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
We once ordered a bulk shipment of used ISA abnd SCSI cards on ebay from Russia for a recycling project.
Due to a mix up at customs I received a mislabeled container destined for a well-known middle east state. Imagine my surprise when we opened it and found four fully-armed intercontinental nuclear cruise missiles. How we laughed. Needless to say we left negative feedback and returned the item. The sales manager was not happy AT ALL.
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beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his mind he dreams himself your master
Hate to float a turd but... there has been a cruse missile with these capabilities for sometime now. The military won't generally acknowledge this fact because doing so would kill the budget for big carriers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS-N-22 this is a link to an older type so feel free to correct me(as if /. needs an invite)-;.
I never, ever read about this in the press, nor do I hear anyone talk about it. But it's not any kind of secret - I found it on some US government disarmament website. My guess is that no one talks about it for fear of making things worse.
While they (mostly) don't admit it, the Israelis are known to have a few hundred nuclear weapons. No doubt they have hydrogen bombs. While they don't openly test, there was what was thought to be a nuclear test in the ocean off of South Africa a while back. Even if they don't test, Israel has no shortage of smart people, or computers capable of accurate numerical modeling.
Do you know the song Ninety Nine Red Balloons? The original German was Neun und Neunzig Luft Balon (SP?). I understand it was inspired by a wayward bundle of helium balloons that was mistaken by the Soviets as a missile launch.
Some people say I'm paranoid. Such people just aren't paying attention.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Never mind the offensive capability, this system has to be one of the stupidest ideas I've ever heard. You never, ever, ever camouflage your military systems to look like civilian infrastructure. If you do, you leave your opponent with no choice but to blow up your privately owned merchant marine, your trucks and every cargo container it can see. Part of the reason Germany started using unrestricted submarine warfare was the my countries use of Q-ships. Part of the reason civilian casualties in Gaza are so high is 'police stations' and 'schools' that are anything but.
Is the idea here to sell this product to countries looking to get their civilians killed for propaganda purposes?
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.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Have you read the Geneva Conventions? You'll find something about combatants being required to wear distinctive badges, signs or uniforms. At first it might appear that those are there to protect soldiers from being shot by "franc tireurs". Nothing could be further from the truth.
As to gaining the trust of the population, you've got to be joking. They don't even trust the people from the next valley. The whole "me and my brother against my cousin" kind of thing.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
***I can't believe it's possible to get anything bigger than a football close enough to a cruiser, bypassing all anti-missile systems.***
Believe it. You may be correct about the open ocean under wartime conditions against an unsophisticated opponent. But major vessels have been taken out by clever opponents in training exercises. Here's a quote from the Guardian's story on Operation Millenium Challenge -- a major war game conducted in 2002.
***In the first few days of the exercise, using surprise and unorthodox tactics, the wily 64-year-old Vietnam veteran sank most of the US expeditionary fleet in the Persian Gulf, bringing the US assault to a halt.***
And here's a link to the Guardian story. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/sep/06/usa.iraq
And, of course, islamic fundamentalists did put a pretty big hole in the USS Cole in 2000 using half their navy (one small boat -- their other boat sank when they overloaded it with explosives). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Cole_bombing
And NPR told me the other day the US Navy is lugging some Somali pirates back to the US for trial after the pirates attempted to board and loot not one, but two, US destroyers. These may not be the smartest pirates in the Red Sea. But they did apparently manage to get into close proximity to the ships.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
A few good points have been made (but need a few editions), and some dumb points have been made. Let's run through them:
1. The SS-N-22 is a hush-hush subject because it basically reduces our carriers to floating targets
Not the case. Details about the SS-N-22 (commonly called the Sunburn) are unclassified. Every ship in the US navy has tactics to defeat it, though obviously some classes of ships are better at it than others. Actually, the missile in the video behaves nothing like a Sunburn; it appears to have satellite guidance, Over the Horizon (OTH) targeting capability, and a terminal sprint vehicle. Thus, it's closer to an advanced Sizzler missile (SS-N-27) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS-N-27 than a Sunburn.
2. Somebody mentioned Exocet missiles and their relative effectiveness. Exocet missiles, to the US navy, are kids' stuff. My ship (an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer) is basically armed to the teeth and can shoot one own without so much as a second thought, but even ships built with self-defense as a third priority are in no real danger. Exocet was a threat when they made the movie Top Gun, but not today.
3. Someone mentioned targeting requirements. This is a good point. If a ship expects to use this in an anti-ship role, it will either have onboard radars for detection and missile control (US is the only navy that has a radar which does both), or receive targeting information from another ship/sub/satellite. In any of these cases, the targeted ship can detect the radar, and any missile control radar it detects is considered a hostile act under international law and triggers the captain's right of self defense (read: he can shoot at you if you point missile control radar at his ship). Also, any merchant ship leaving port with a bunch of innocent container boxes PLUS high-powered missile control radar is, to say the least, suspicious.
4. Several people mentioned the Phalanx Close In Weapon System (CIWS, pronounced See-Whiz). This is the last resort for most classes of ships. It can only shoot out a few miles, but it's very effective when it does fire. If this system is firing, by the way, then the missile has somehow made it past your three to four other layers of defense, not even counting soft kill options like jamming whatever active radar or semi-active/passive sensor is guiding the missile.
5. A few people mentioned the ethical issue of arming merchant ships. This is always considered in warplans, from low to very high scale. Bottom line is that it's a dumb idea that will get you one free shot and then cost you your whole merchant fleet.
6. Ignoring all of that, no matter how effective any weapon system is, at least in a shipboard environment, you only get one free shot. After that free shot it becomes a hot war scenario and every ship captain will change from "ask first, ask again, check three times and only fire when fired upon" to "ask once and if you think he's hostile, shoot." It can even go further to "Check to see if your'e sure he's a friend, and if you can't tell, shoot." At that point the name of the game is ship detection, not missile technology.
This weapon system doesn't revolutionize warfare at all. Business as usual.
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.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.