HIGH OCTANE SPECULATIONS ABOUT THAT RUSSIAN MISSILE MESSAGE
(Today is Thanksgiving week in what was once the USA, and accordingly I will be "squishing" all of this week's blogs into Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. We will return to our normal schedule for the first half of December, after which both Daniel and I will be taking some much-needed time off until after the new year, so please continue to check the schedule. We wish everyone very safe travels for the Thanksgiving holiday and good times with your families and friends.)
Ever since the Russian missile attack on Dnepropetrovsk in the Ukraine, I've been receiving emails from various regular readers of and contributors to this website asking me what I think about it. Usually these emails have been accompanied by the videos of the attack, asking me if what is seen on the videos is evidence of some sort of exotic technology. Here's RT's presentation and comment on the video:
Medvedev reacts to VIDEO of hypersonic missile strike
As a result of all these emails and interest in my high octane speculation about the strike, I've decided to start this week's blogs not with my usual fare of commenting about an article that someone has sent, but rather to offer my thoughts about this strike, and why I think it was one of the clearest messages Russia could possibly send to the West, and why it seems in my opinion to be completely misunderstood by the West. After all, we're also watching stories emerge of Finland, Sweden, Germany and other European nations "preparing" their populations for war, with the usual unstated proposition that any such war will automatically be nuclear.
It's this that has me concerned in part, for after years of allowing "wokery" to spread in their militaries while sumultaneously gutting the size of their conventional arms and the logistical infrastructure to support those conventional arms in any contest with peer powers like Russia or China, the West has limited the spectrum of its effective conventional responses such that any such response must start with large conventional weapons and escalate from there, hence the USSA's recent decision to allow the criminal Zelensky government to fire American and British long rang missiles into Russian territory.
Mr. Putin warned that any such development would be responded to, and here we are, mere days after the Russian missile was fired at Dnepropetrovsk. Make no mistake, this was both a response, and a message to the West, a message that I fear has already been profoundly misinterpreted.
The misinterpretation begins by observing that most commentators have pointed out that the missile that was fired was (1) a test, and more importantly, (2) carried only conventional warheads, even though the missile can carry nuclear warheads. But there is a third issue that some have raised, particularly in the emails I received: (3) there is not one incoming track, but several. It is this feature that has led some people to question whether they are looking at a missile strike at all, but rather at something "exotic" being called a missile by the Russian authorities.
So herewith my high octane speculation, which I begin by noting that I am not a veteran of any military service anywhere, and hence, have no expertise in military operations or ordnance whatsoever. That said, my first reaction upon seeing the video was that the incoming tracks and distant explosions were similar to the types of attacks one might see from World War Two rocket artillery, like the Soviet Katyushas (nicknamed Stalin's organ pipes by the Germans), or the German Nebelwerfer (nicknamed "screeming meamies" by the Allied troops unlucky enough to undergo a barrage). In short, there was nothing remarkable, at least to me, by the multiple tracks visible in the video. If there is anything remarkable about these tracks, it is that they seem to be the result of one or two missiles, that is, one intermediate range missile had multiple re-entry vehicle warheads which, when the video is examined carefully, appear to have been individually targeted as such warheads can be.
But why "waste" such a MIRVed missile on mere conventional warheads?
It is precisely at that question where my high octane speculation begins, because I strongly suspect that this fact involves the message the Russians are trying to send, and which I also strongly suspect may be in the process of being profoundly misunderstood by at least some in the west, and unfortunately in most cases by those at the very "top". My high octane speculation involves a bit of a necessary trip around Harvey's Barn, as my mother used to say, in order to illustrate what the Russians have just done and how significant it may really be. As many regular readers here are aware, one of my fascinations is artillery, and particularly the enormous super-heavy cannon the Germans managed to build and make (barely) road mobile during World Wars I and II: the enormous 42cm "Big Berthas" of the First World War, or the very mobile and quickly-emplaced 35cm howitzers, or the monstrously large 60cm self-propelled "Karl" mortars, of the Second World war. I've managed to collect just about everything publicly available about these monsters, and two very interesting features have stood out about this literature: (1) those sources coming from Aliied countries during the wars go out of their way to say that these monsters were not worth the expense to build and move (much less supply) them, and that they were not that effective anyway. But the sources that manage to cite the unit diaries and documents of the German units actually operating these weapons tell a very different story. For example, the German crews operating the gigantic "Karl" mortars almost universally record two interesting facts: (1) the targets were usually destroyed ("obliterated" in some instances) after a few rounds were fired (the Karl fired a projectile weighing about two and a quarter tons with a bursting charge of about 500 lbs), and here's the important part for our purposes: (2) the dispersion of the projectiles from the target was within very narrow percentages, i.e., the overwhelming amount of projectiles landed within the circle where they would do maximum damage. Thus the Germans concluded that these enormous weapons were entirely worth the cost to build, and the trouble it took to deploy and use them operationally. Why do Allied sources denigrate these systems? I suspect that it is for the simple reason that there was nothing comparable in any Allied country's arsenal.
And that, at the first level of my high octane speculation about the missile strike, is what I think is going on here: what the Russians just demonstrated that they do not need to arm their long range missiles with nuclear weapons to be able to destroy a target - and much will depend on aerial or satellite photographs of the damage done to the factories at Dnepropetrovsk, which, rest assured, the Russians have already taken and analyzed. The Russians have carried out strategic rocket strikes with the precision of artillery. They do not need to put nuclear weapons on their rockets because their precision does not require nuclear weapons for target suppression or destruction. Or to put it differently, the Russians have demonstrated strategic parity with the West regarding precision guided weapons. Now couple that ability to inter-continental ballistic missiles and you get the idea: the Russians have just told the west that they can drop their warheads down the chimneys of billionaire hidey-holes. And as for those warheads being conventional, it takes little research to discover that the Russians also have some very large and powerful conventional munitions, which one can only assume are adaptable to their missile delivery systems.
The upshot of all of this is that the message is "See? We don't even have to go nuclear to destroy strategic targets."
But is there another level to this message beyond my concerns with "warhead dispersion on target?" Indeed, there is. And indeed, target dispersion is probably the least of worries. The second level of worry is that these incoming warheads were hypersonic and coming in, as is visible on the video, at a very acute angle relative to the target plane. They were coming in at a high angle, just like the projectiles from those enormous German siege guns from the world wars that were used to smash hardened and fortified targets. And that high angle should give anyone pause, for in effect, that high angle, plus the sheer velocity of the warheads, means that the missiles might possibly function as a kind of rocket delivery system for the familiar kinetic weapon, "the rods of God." The Wikipedia article on Kinetic Bombardment notes that the United States air Force produced a report about using tungsten rods - twenty feet long and one foot in diameter - that would do nuclear-sized damage simply by the sheer kinetic energy of the impact, which would be around Mach 10, or 10 times the speed of sound. Other systems would impact slightly lower velocities. The advantage of such a weapon is that it has a very low radar cross section which, when coupled with its high impact velocity, makes it virtually impossible to intercept and defend against.
Which brings me to the second level of the message I think the Russians may have just sent, the second deeper level of today's high octane speculation: perhaps the Russians have wedded four crucial strategic bombardment concepts: (1) Multiple targetable re-entry warheads, (2) precision targeting, (3) hyper-sonic warheads and delivery systems, and (4) kinetic impact warheads. Or to put it more simply, perhaps we're simply looking at "rods of God" technologies, but based on ground-based delivery systems, rather than orbital platforms. If that is the case, moreover, the Russians are also letting the world know that not only that they also have kinetic bombardment technology, but that its technology can be scaled for tactical, operational, or strategic purposes.
And if that is the case, the Russians really do not need to "go thermonuclear" at all... there are many, many steps of "horizontal escalation" on the spectrum of potential responses, before one even reaches the thermonuclear stage. And yes, dropping a rod of God on the roof of deep underground bunkers - billionaire hidey holes - is definitely a way to destroy the target. And the Russians have long experience with such things, having been on the receiving end of the earlier German versions of them. The idea is an old one, after all; the technology has merely extended the range, destruction, and accuracy...
... and the Russians are not fools...
See you on the flip side...
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