The fact that the Ukrainian air force has still not been destroyed or paralyzed after a month of war may be partly due to Russian problems with cruise missiles and other precision weapons. In the early days of the invasion, the air bases were heavily targeted by precision weapons, such as the Kalibr cruise missile.
It is not the first time that Russian problems with their high-tech weapons have come to light during a war. In 2015, when Moscow first deployed precision weapons on a large scale in Syria, some of the cruise missile launches also failed or failed to hit their target. However, what is now striking is the high failure rate of about 60 percent for some weapons. From the deployment in Syria, it was never clear how many of the precision weapons were plagued with problems.
“They don’t work,” a Pentagon official said during a briefing on the Ukraine war. “They fail. Either the launch fails, they fail to hit the target, or they don’t explode on contact.” This would appear from information from the American intelligence services that monitor the military operations of the Russian army.
Calibr
The Russians have so far fired more than 1,200 rockets at targets in Ukraine, according to the US. For a large part it concerns cruise missiles. The Pentagon has declined to comment on the cause of the high failure rate, which has been confirmed to Reuters news agency.
Cruise missiles such as the Kalibr and the American Tomahawk fly autonomously, using GPS and their radar, at low altitudes to a preset target, often more than a thousand kilometers away. They can be launched by aircraft as well as naval vessels.
The six-meter long missiles are mainly used against very important targets, such as command centers, radar and air defence. If the enemy air defenses are destroyed from a great distance at the start of a war, they can then operate freely in the airspace to attack other military targets.
After the first US deployment of cruise missiles during the 1991 Gulf War, several problems with US precision weapons have also come to light. But never on the scale as it is now in Ukraine. Of the 297 Tomahawks that the US fired from naval ships at Iraq in 1991, six fell into the water and nine did not leave the launch site. However, these kinds of problems were later fixed.
bombers
According to the Pentagon, the Russians mainly have problems with cruise missiles launched from their bombers. Of these, 20 to 60 percent would not work. These cruise missiles, such as the Kh-555, which according to the Russians have a range of about 2,500 kilometers, were used, among other things, to attack the military base Yavoriv near the Polish border. The attack earlier this month killed 35 people.
It was the first time that the Russians struck so close to Poland. According to Moscow, the base was used to store Western weapons. Pentagon officials said there were problems with many of the cruise missiles in this airstrike, in particular. The Russians then launched the cruise missiles from bombers located in Russia.
The Kh-55 was also deployed in Syria in 2015, when many of the cruise missiles were not working properly. The new bad luck indicates that the Russians have still not solved the problems with this high-tech weapon. Then two long-range strategic Tupolev bombers fired 34 cruise missiles at targets of IS fighters.
Explosion over the street
According to Australian Air Force expert Tom Cooper, who wrote a book about the Russian intervention in Syria, two cruise missiles went wrong immediately after launch. Four more Kh-555s, photos also showed, crashed in Iran. Also arriving at the target in western Aleppo, according to Cooper’s research, things went wrong: four cruise missiles crashed and one destroyed a school.
In Idlib, a Kh-555 exploded prematurely over a busy street. Dozens are said to have been killed. Also in Idlib, the Russians sent the cruise missiles at the wrong targets. For example, a factory was razed to the ground. A Syrian army headquarters was also hit in the major cruise missile attack.