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Cruise missiles to be fought at strategic level - Part 3

The mentioned methodological approach to the formation of the strategic fight against cruise missiles allows creating a four-stage spatial-time model of the fight by a strategic group.

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Neptune is a Ukrainian cruise anti-ship missile under development by Luch Design Bureau which has maximum firing range of 280 km.Expected to be mounted on three platforms: ship, land and air launchers (Picture source: Wikipedia/Ukrainian MoD)

The first stage is cruise missile carriers in deployment bases. It is necessary to destroy the carriers on land and at sea. The long-range aviation, missiles troops of a military district and navy forces can cope with the mission.

The second stage is cruise missiles carriers in flight to the strike area and in advance routes to the launch area. The stage should destroy air carriers of the missiles in flight before the launch and naval carriers at sea before the launch. Long-range aviation, tactical aviation, the navy, and fighter jets can accomplish the mission in the tactical operational range.

The third stage is cruise missiles in flight before target distribution. Fighter jets, fleet air defense, ground air defense, antiaircraft units of the Aerospace Forces, electronic warfare can destroy the missiles. The methods would include air combat by fighter jets, air defense by the Navy, Aerospace Forces, ground air defense and electronic warfare.

The fourth stage is cruise missiles in the strike area. They should be destroyed by antiaircraft units of missile forces and air defense of the objects.

Strategic command officials can imitate the effectiveness of operations at all stages. Approaches to assessing the effectiveness of the cruise missile defense can differ. It is difficult to choose a single indicator, as the character of missions (offensive and defensive) calls for the most suitable indicator.

The prevented damage to the defended objects is the most appropriate indicator, which is calculated by the total number of defended objects and their significance. It shall be calculated with imitation models, which exist in the information-modeling environment of the Russian armed forces. They calculate the prevented damage and potential losses of the forces engaged in the fight against the aerospace adversary. The modeling of actions of the forces engaged in the fight against the aerospace adversary at the strategic level demands a major number of options of hostile actions (massive cruise missile strikes in this case) and of friendly actions. It is a labor intensive and costly task.

To rule out friendly actions which do not correspond to the choice of potential capabilities by the imitation model, it is necessary to provide a preliminary assessment of their effectiveness on the basis of analytical calculations of the total mathematical expectation of the number of destroyed cruise missiles at all combat stages, which meets the norms of mission accomplishment.

The material basis of the designed strategic methods of cruise missile fight should include modern weapons and hardware of the arms of forces engaged in the fight against the missiles and represented by its second component — organizational-technical system. Its main elements are: a subsystem to command the forces in the cruise missile fight; a subsystem of reconnaissance-information provision of command posts, a subsystem to destroy ground, sea and air forces of the adversary that fire cruise missiles; a subsystem of operational and combat provision of units and formations engaged in cruise missile fight.

The above said allows concluding that effective fight against cruise missiles in modern conditions is impossible without complex engagement of various forces at all levels. The mission can be accomplished only by planning and engaging forces at the strategic level with a possibility of complex engagement of long-range and tactical aviation, fighter jets, ground and navy air defense, antiaircraft units and electronic warfare by a single concept and plan to provide a complex method to fight cruise missiles in conditions of their massive engagement, Retired Colonel PhD Military Sciences N. Simanenkov and Lieutenant-Colonel A. Burukhin write in the Military Thought theoretical journal.