The Russian Air Force’s long-range air-launched cruise missiles are proving to be highly unreliable, coming up short in President Vladimir Putin's campaign against Ukraine, according to a military expert.
The weapons, believed to be the Raduga Kh-101 (RS-AS-23A Kodiak), are failing at an exorbitant rate when it comes to hitting enemy targets in Ukraine, said Douglas Barrie, a senior fellow for military aerospace at the International Institute for Strategic Studies think tank in London.
Such a high failure rate could be down to multiple factors, including issues with launching capabilities or the weapons failing to explode after hitting targets, he said.
The Russian-made weapons which carry a conventional warhead are designed to defeat air defence systems by flying at low, terrain-hugging altitudes to avoid radar systems.
The missile has a range of up to 2,800 kilometres. At its launch it weighs between 2,300 and 2,400 kilograms and is fired without a booster, using the aircraft’s momentum at release to give it initial velocity.
Experts had believed its accuracy to be quite high due to the electronic Glonass satellite navigation ― the Russian equivalent to GPS ― and TV terminal guidance used in deploying it.
However, US intelligence suggests it has not been performing well for the Russians in Ukraine.
Mr Barrie said intelligence laid out in a US Department of Defence briefing gave further weight to the widely held assessment that Russia’s war against its neighbour is not going according to plan.
“Russia’s invasion of Ukraine appears to have been poorly planned and executed, with the expectation that the campaign would last only two-to-three days,” he wrote in a blog on Friday.
“As it has progressed, or stalled, it has also exposed the failings in some of Moscow’s most capable air-launched systems, shortcomings that the Russian military will want to resolve.”
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He wrote: “The Kh-101 was used successfully during Russia’s intervention in the Syrian civil war to strike enemy targets and is now the primary conventionally armed long-range land-attack cruise missile in the air force inventory.
“However, it is being used in far greater numbers in the war Russia is currently waging on Ukraine, with an apparent failure rate that, if correct, will be of significant concern to Moscow.”
In a US Department of Defence briefing on March 21, unnamed officials discussed Russia’s guided weapons inventory.
They said: “They [Russia] still have the majority of their stocks available to them, but they have expended quite a bit, particularly in sensitive cruise missiles, air-launched cruise missiles, and they have also suffered a not-insignificant number of failures of those munitions.”
The officials did not provide evidence to back up their assessment. Citing American intelligence, three sources said the US estimated that Russia's failure rate varied day-to-day, depended on the type of missile being launched, and could sometimes exceed 50 per cent. Two of them said it reached as high as 60 per cent.
Mr Barrie said: “Given that Ukraine appears to have a significant number of ground-based air defence missile systems and air-surveillance radars that remain operational, and are being used effectively, Kh-101 launches are likely to have taken place well inside Russian airspace.”
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