Consolidation Is the Game in Paris
One of the more striking features of the recent Paris Air Show was the amalgamation of nearly all European missile systems under the single roof of the emerging MBDA company. The great question is how MBDA will be able to trim its numerous parallel product lines to achieve the economies of scale required if it is to develop new weapons in competition with U.S. firms. For example, in the long-range land-attack cruise missile category, firms which joined together as MBDA produce the Anglo-French SCALP/Storm Shadow, the Swedish-German Taurus (and its unpowered submunitions dispenser version), and the British PGM series. All of these weapons are airlaunched, but a ship-launched version of Taurus is under development, and there has been talk of a ship-launched version of SCALP. For that matter, Saab, which is deeply involved in the Taurus program, also makes RBS 15, an antiship missile with broadly similar performance. Similarly, although it is not part of MBDA, Kongsberg, the Norwegian company, is partnered with the conglomerate in the development of its NSM antiship missile (a Penguin replacement).
In the past, different governments were quite willing to pay heavily for national defense firms to develop their own missiles, even though they knew that production runs would be short and consequently that unit costs would be high. In their view, preserving national capabilities was worth the cost. For example, the Swedish RBS 15 was developed specifically as an alternative to buying the U.S. Harpoon, on the ground that Sweden had to preserve a missile-building capacity (much the same logic applied to Swedish combat aircraft development).
MBDA can be seen as a symptom of acceptance, among European governments, that eventually there will be no national entities within a larger Europe, that the European Union will become a kind of superstate—the long-awaited United States of Europe. In that case, it will be perfectly acceptable for national military development and production capacities to vanish, just as the U.S. government sees no point in maintaining separate military producers in every state.
It is also possible that European governments are no longer particularly defense-minded, so that many of them no longer consider preservation of national development and manufacturing capacity terribly important. Moreover, arms orders have been cut drastically, so unit prices are higher than ever. In this environment, with little public support for massive defense spending, efforts to rationalize European manufacturing are presumably more and more attractive—which means that conglomeration is more acceptable, whatever its larger political implications. The question which remains is whether the separate militaries which buy the missiles will be willing to accept centrally-developed ones, or indeed whether they will be able to agree the specifications to which such weapons will be built. Otherwise, it will matter little whether MBDA is one company or four or ten; it will still be making small lots of disparate weapons for its several customers, at a very high unit price. The history of international arms programs, such as Tornado or the Horizon frigate, has by and large been an unhappy one. The main exceptions have been programs run by one major customer, into which smaller ones were invited, so that specifications were set largely by the majority user.
India Tests New Antiship Missile
The new PJ-10 antiship missile recently tested in India, a potentially important example of international cooperation, was not at the show. PJ-10 uses an airframe and engine supplied by Mashinostroyeniye, the Russian organization responsible for numerous Soviet-era long-range antiship missiles (such as SS-N-3, -7, -9, -12, and -19) and for the post-Soviet Yakhont and Alfa (not to be confused with the Novator Alfa which the Indians bought as part of the Klub system). An Indian organization provided the electronics. The joint venture was called BrahMos, BramaputraMoscow. Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian arms developers have been offering new weapons on a joint-development basis. From the buyer's point of view such an arrangement is attractive as a way of gaining technological expertise, something license production of an existing design cannot offer. Thus far, except for PJ-10, the Indians generally have been limited to license production of Russian-designed equipment. It is only fair, however, to point out that the Indians developed some important electronic counter-countermeasures improvements to Styx, which the Russians adopted. At the same time, some Western companies such as Signaal set up the major Indian electronics producer, Bharat Electronics. While the antennas of many of its radars betray their Western origins, the waveforms differ from those of the equivalent Signaal sets. This suggests that the Indians are producing their own electronics to feed existing antennas.
Yakhont is a supersonic (Mach 2) ramjet suitable for launch from surface ships, submarines, aircraft, and shore launchers, both fixed and mobile. Its range is 300 kilometers (high-altitude cruise) or 120 kilometers in sea-skimming mode. Apparently it is the successful follow-on to a failed Mashinostroyeniye program of the 1970s. That failure in turn led to a quick Soviet Navy decision to buy the current Moskit (NATO SS-N-22) missile, developed by the rival Raduga design bureau. Now Mashinostroyeniye clearly sees Yakhont as the successor to Moskit, which has had little export success (apart from sales to China on board Sovremennyy-class destroyers). Compared to Moskit, Yakhont is somewhat more compact; a Nanuchka guided-missile patrol combatant can carry eight such missiles, whereas it takes a large destroyer to carry eight Moskits. Performance is comparable, but the Russian version of Moskit probably requires mid-course guidance from the launch platform, whereas Yakhont does not. Yakhont is described as a universal missile, whereas Moskit had to be redesigned for aircraft or coastal launch. It is not clear whether this difference is a matter of the inputs the launch platform must supply. Moreover, Moskit has never been described as suited for submarine launch.
The other major alternative to Yakhont is Novator's Alfa or Klub, a subsonic missile which fires a supersonic terminal stage when it is still some miles from the target. Mashinostroyeniye argues that because it is supersonic throughout its flight, Yakhont is more likely to hit a moving target hundreds of miles away. Even though its terminal stage is supersonic (to frustrate terminal defenses), Klub still flies for a much longer time, during which the target probably moves. During the Cold War, when the U.S. Navy deployed the subsonic antiship version of Tomahawk, its view was that as long as the target had not been alerted, it would be possible to project target motion ahead well enough to have a good chance of hitting. The movement of an unalerted target was hardly random. However, the ability to detect and track targets at ranges of hundreds of miles depended on the existence of a rather sophisticated ship-tracking system, which buyers of Yakhont almost certainly will lack.
Mashinostroyeniye has been advertising Yakhont for some years, and reportedly it has now been bought by China (presumably for later Sovremennyy-class destroyers) and by Iran. It has been tested on board Tarantul and Nanuchkaclass missile combatants and on board a Charlie-class guided-missile submarine, and it has been fired from mobile shore-based launchers. Only the airborne version has not yet been fully tested, although it has been displayed at several Russian shows. At the Paris Air Show, Mashinostroyeniye showed a video including a drawing of a Bear-F (Tu-142, which is in Indian service) carrying six missiles underwing; a poster showed three carried by a MiG-29. The Russian press claims that PJ-10 will be displayed at this year's Moscow Air Show, and that it will enter Indian service (and be offered for foreign sale) in 2003.
The Indian media have reported that PJ-10 will be modified to carry an Indian nuclear weapon. If that is so, the joint development arrangement accepted by the Russians likely will shield them from any U.S. sanctions against nuclear proliferation. The Russian reasonably can say that they sold only the missile airframe, and that its range was within the current antiproliferation guidelines.
India already has bought a Russian surface-to-surface missile, Klub/3M54, of which Yakhont is a competitor. Were Yakhont/PJ- 10 not being built under a joint-development program, almost certainly the Indians would not have opted for the logistical problems imposed by a parallel weapon system. Since the missile is being built in India, however, it is likely to be widely used; Klub then seems to have been an interim purchase intended to offset the Pakistani adoption of the French sub-Exocet. Likely platforms for PJ-10 are the Russian-supplied Nanuchkas, currently armed with obsolescent Styx missiles, and perhaps Indian aircraft. The Indians also have claimed that they will lease one or two Russian nuclear submarines. If that is the case, the submarines might be Charlies, and PJ-10 might be an acceptable successor to their Mashinostroyeniye-developed SS-N-9 missiles. For some years the Indians have been writing about a future submarine-launched Sagarika missile, which is to arm their projected nuclear submarine (based on the Russian Charlie). The submarine-launched version of PJ-10 is probably Sagarika. It is interesting to note that on board other Indian warships the subsonic SS-N-25 "Harpoonski" has been installed as the successor to Styx.