Missiles and Anti-Missiles

The Ukrainian military is claiming that overnight the Russians launched a major missile barrage toward Kyiv, Odessa, and other places, and that they shot down all of them. In particular they say the Russians launched six Kinzhal hypersonic missiles, all of which were shot down. (NY Times, CNN, Reuters). It was confirmed last week that Ukraine had shot down one Kinzhal using the American Patriot missile system; pieces of the intercepted missile were recovered, and the US said they verified the shoot-down using "technical means." The Russians had some initial success attacking Ukrainian targets with cheap Iranian Shahed drones, which sound like lawnmowers and fly at around 120 mph, but Ukraine recently claimed that Russia launched 36 of them in one night and all were shot down.

Meanwhile the Israelis have pretty much neutralized rocket attacks on their cities using the Iron Dome interceptor system.

Old-fashioned ballistic missiles, it seems, are no longer much of a threat to any nation with modern air defenses, and larger drones are highly vulnerable. Obviously there are caveats; no system is perfect, and it would certainly be possible to overwhelm the air defense of any particular location with enough missiles. Still, the equation has shifted dramatically. I remember 20 years ago people saying that Chinese ballistic missiles would easily destroy US aircraft carriers, but I believe modern Aegis air defense systems make a carrier battle group (carrier plus destroyer and cruiser escorts) all but invulnerable to such an attack. Modern radars and guidance systems are making the shooting down of Mach 5 ballistic missiles routine.

Neither Iron Dome nor Patriot is a new system; the first version of the Patriot was deployed in 1984, and the version used in Ukraine is about 20 years old, while Iron Dome dates to 2011. New classes of attack missiles are coming into use, in particular maneuverable hypersonic cruise missiles, but so are new generations of interceptors; more advanced versions of the Patriot are already in service, and a new variant is in development, besides other, future systems now known only by acronyms like GMD and NGI. (Briefing on US missile defense plans here)

Meanwhile Russia has had some success defeating Ukrainian drone attacks using electronic warfare; apparently the reason we haven't seen much lately about the Bayraktar TB-2 drones that were early heroes of the war is that Russia has figured out how to jam their control systems.

And that's before we get into lasers; both the US and Israel (at least) are known to be working on lasers fast and powerful enough to intercept incoming missiles and even artillery shells. They need a lot of power, but any warship has plenty of power for several shots by such systems, and if the power grid is up and running any key target like a headquarters could be similarly defended.

Which leads me to imagine a future battlefield in which attacking missiles must use stealth technology, high maneuverability, and randomized attack paths to have any chance of evading missile defenses. Laser-defended strong points (like ships) might become all but impervious to missiles, and it might take a high volume of artillery fire to penetrate their defenses. There is talk of putting lasers on tanks strong enough to shoot down at least one incoming anti-tank missile, and also of drone swarms that would hover over attacking forces and throw themselves in the way of incoming shells or rockets.

Will the powerful attack weapons that make modern battlefields so deadly be neutralized by a new generation of AI-directed, laser-powered defenses? And what would war look like then?