Australia’s Defence 3: Lessons from the Ukraine War that Australia can use
by David Archibald
27 April 2024
Cruise Missiles
War is a clash of industrial systems, and industrial systems are about delivering high explosive to the enemy. The Ukraine War has thrown up one of the better ways of doing that. This is the Kh-101 cruise missile with a 450 kg warhead and a 5,000 km range. It is 7.45 metres long, weighs 2.45 tonnes, and entered service in the Russian Air Force in 2012. Shaping to reduce its radar cross section to 0.01 m2 also produces body lift. Its turbine engine has 1,000 lb of thrust. The Russians are currently producing 40 per month. The Tu-95 bomber has been adapted to carry eight at a time. The Tu-95 was introduced into service in 1956 and is expected to serve until at least 2040.
The base of operations is on the Kola Peninsula, well out of the current range of Ukrainian drones. Not all the 5,000 km range is needed for this mission so the Russians have replaced some of the fuel tanks with another 450 kg warhead, to take the total warhead weight to 900 kg.
Figure 1: Tu-95 with its load of eight Kh-101 cruise missiles
What makes a clone of this missile ideal for Australia is that an aircraft taking off from Darwin could fire these missiles from within Australian air space and strike targets as far north along the Chinese coast as Shanghai. In theory, they could hit ships tied up in port and any in the 5,000 km between. Currently Australia doesn’t have an aircraft with the ability to launch a weapon of this size. That is easily fixed though by converting passenger jet aircraft like the 737, making drones that could launch one at a time, or buying the F-15EX from Boeing.
Ukraine has been able to shoot down the Kh-101 with reasonable proficiency, however. An investment in another system to defeat Chinese SAM systems is likely to be cost-effective in increasing the number of Kh-101s that get through to their target. That system would be the PrSM.
Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles
The one that Russia has been using in the Ukraine War is the Iskander. It’s a single stage, solid fuel missile with a Mach 5.0 burnout velocity. The Russians are making them at the rate of 64 per year. The Patriot system is able to intercept them, but not any of the other of Ukraine’s missile defence systems. It carries a 700 kg warhead up to 500 km, has a unit cost of US$3 million and an accuracy of seven metres. It has a build cost of US$652/kg and a warhead delivery cost of US$8.57/kg-km. The air-launched version is called the Kinzhal and has three times the range.
Figure 2: Iskander missiles on their launcher
Ever since the Yom Kippur War of 1973, when Israeli jets providing ground support in the Golan Heights were promptly shot down by Syrian surface-to-air missile (SAM) systems, USAF operational doctrine has been to eliminate the enemy air defence systems before doing anything else. This first phase of the campaign might take three days or so. A special missile was developed for this purpose, called the homing antiradiation missile (HARM). This missile, carried by jet fighters, would be fired at a SAM system while outside its engagement envelope. These have had a poor record though.
In operation Allied Force against Serbia in 1999, NATO fired 743 HARM missiles against SAM sites. Most missed. Of the 389 HARM missiles fired against the mobile SA-6 batteries, only three succeeded in destroying the SAM battery. The numbers for the Ukraine War are yet to be released, but anecdotally the Russian S-300 systems have been successful at shooting down most HARMs fired at them. They have also shot down HIMARS missiles. More successful have been attacks by ATACMS missiles, which have a higher burnout velocity. With a cluster munition warhead, ATACMS missiles don’t have to be accurate to be effective against soft targets like SAM systems.
The latest version of the HARM missile is called the Stand-in Attack Weapon (SiAW), which has chines to reduce its signature to ground-based radars and also provide body lift. The SiAW isn’t cheap with Poland buying 360 for US$1,275 billion (US$ 3.5m each).
Figure 3: SiAW for attacking SAM systems
SiAW is an air-launched weapon, meaning that an aircraft has to approach the SAM system, which would like to shoot it down. A better solution is the Precision Strike Missile (PrSM), which completed development in late 2023. Ground-launched, its range will be about 650 km. The PrSM is four metres long, 0.43 metres in diameter, weighs 1.42 tonnes with a 91 kg fragmentation warhead. This last attribute means that it doesn’t have to hit a radar to shred it. An air-launched version, when developed, is likely to have a range of 1,500 km.
Figure 4: PrSM missile
Increment 2 of PrSM will be able to hit ships at sea using inertial guidance, GPS, an infrared imaging seeker. and emission locators that home in on the target ship’s emissions of radar, data links and jamming. Ships must use their radar system to detect, track and target incoming missiles. At the same time their radar acts a beacon, telling everything within in a few hundred kilometres exactly where they are, and what they are. If the ship knows it is under attack and turns their radar off, the infrared seeker will find them against the background of the colder ocean.
Australia has contributed US$54 million to PrSM development. Hopefully we will be making them in Australia, as well as the HIMARS. When attacking a ship, it is best to use six or so missiles at a time to overwhelm the defence. At least one should get through and damage the radar, allowing for cruise missiles to complete the destruction of the vessel. At 500 km range, a PrSM missile will reach its target 10 minutes after launch. A cruise missile launched at the same time will reach the target 20 minutes later.
PrSM is another system that traces its beginning to the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Americans inspecting the battle field after that war were surprised and alarmed by the initial rate of advance of the Egyptians. So they developed the MLRS rocket system as an assault breaker –unguided rockets with a range of 30 km release cluster munitions to shred the infantry supporting an armoured assault. Those first missiles were four metres long and that has carried through to every iteration since, despite advances in technology, changes in warhead, and target sets. Those first MLRS had to be pointed at where they were expected to land. That is not necessary now, because missiles these days are guided and can start changing direction as soon as they leave the launch tube. This means that it is better to lower logistic costs by changing to 20 foot shipping containers as the launch unit. This would obviate the need for special vehicles for carrying the missiles around the battlefield. It would also allow them to be 50% longer, which means the warhead could be three times larger.
Unmanned Surface Vehicles
Australia can only be invaded by people in metal containers -– ships and aircraft. With current technology these metal vehicles can be detected from thousands of kilometres away. With satellites and over-the-horizon radar, they can be targeted as soon as they leave their port or airfield. That’s great, but it can be even simpler. Ukraine, with no navy and a tiny air force, has driven Russian naval ships 900 km from the nearest Ukrainian-controlled shoreline by using unmanned surface vessels weighing a couple of tonnes. These are essentially scaled-up jet skis with a warhead.
Figure 5: Ukrainian unmanned surface vessel
Figure 5 shows a Ukrainian drone system that has been successful at sinking several Russian naval ships that weigh several thousand tonnes. The sinkings are done at night by drone swarms of half dozen at a time. This drone can handle sea states of up to 1.5 metres, cruises at 45 kmph, has a top speed of 90 kmph, carries a warhead of 860 kg, and its range is 900 km. In early 2024, 35 Sea Babies were built for US$8 million, which is US$229,000 each. That’s US$1.5 million for a swarm that provides a good chance of sinking a US$300 million Chinese destroyer.
In theory they could be dropped by aircraft in front of an advancing Chinese fleet. The drone swarm and the Chinese fleet would have a closing speed of at least 70 km per hour. Mayhem would ensue after dark as the drones, guided by AI interpretation of radar signatures and infrared images, closed in on the Chicom aggressors.
Cluster Munitions
A Ukrainian observer of the war reports:
From separate units and separate areas, they are excited about one thing in particular — artillery cluster munitions. I knew these were something that had made an impact but these guys talk about them with reverence, they are coveted and rationed and utilised like no other munition on the frontline. A single accurate round has the ability to stop an entire attack in its tracks.
The original assault breaker missile that developed in response to the Yom Kippur War had a cluster munition warhead in which a few hundred bomblets would spread over an area the size of a football field. The bomblets would self-arm as they fell, but some didn’t, and this was the basis of a campaign to remove cluster munition warheads from the US inventory. They were replaced in the US inventory by a unitary warhead of 180,000 tungsten pellets of half a gram each. The unitary warheads only service an area one quarter of the size of the cluster munition variant, so four times as many are needed to have the same effect. South Korea makes cluster munitions with a zero defect rate.
Australia will be making its own rocket artillery rounds to be fired from HIMARS launchers. We should be making at least half of them as the cluster variant or else our troops will be fighting with one arm behind their back, and some will die needlessly as a result. Cluster warheads will also be good for destroying the Chinese airfields in the Spratly Islands.
Wheeled Artillery
Ideally, artillery does most of the work on the battlefield. The infantry only have to walk into enemy positions reduced by artillery fire. But radar can track artillery shells and map where they are being fired from. Russian return fire in Ukraine can be as fast as three minutes. This doesn’t have to hit the gun to be effective; shell splinters will disable the crew. The first solution to this problem was to put the artillery barrel on a tank chassis and protect the crew with armour. The next solution was to put the barrel on a truck chassis. While providing minimal protection against shell splinters, it can move from its firing position much faster and thus avoid return fire. The best of these systems appear to be the French Caesar and the Swedish Archer.
Comments a Russian artillery man:
Their most terrible weapon is Caesar. It is used to destroy particularly important targets and to conduct counter-battery combat against our guns. The firing range of a conventional projectile is more than 40 kilometres, making this weapon inaccessible to the return fire of our Soviet guns…. Overall, this gun is from a different century compared to most of the guns we have. The enemy has few of these and he takes great care of them. These French howitzers took an enormous amount of lives from Russian artillerymen.
Australia artillery is dominantly towed. After seeing some self-propelled howitzers in action in Afghanistan, we are finally getting a handful of them. But it would be better to obtain wheeled ones in great numbers by building them under licence in Australia.
Figure 6: Wheeled self-propelled howitzers in use in Ukraine
Tanks and Drones
Israel invaded South Lebanon in 2006. It didn’t go as well as they expected. In particular, Hezbollah used the Kornet tandem shaped-charge antitank guided missile (ATGM) to hit the side armour of the Israeli Merkava tanks. Israel’s response to this development was to invent two separate active protection systems for armoured vehicles: Trophy and Iron Fist. These add half a tonne to the weight of a tank and US$1 million to the price. They consist of a radar on each corner of the turret, which directs a shotgun-like burst of 35 small explosively formed penetrators at the incoming ATGM. Israel had them in active service in 2010 and they have been quite successful at protecting Israeli tanks since.
The US failed in an attempt to develop a similar system. It has now adopted the Trophy system on some of its Abrams tanks. Australia is putting the Iron Fist system from Elbit on the Redback fighting vehicles we will be making. The lesson is that it has taken a couple of decades for this development to be adopted outside Israel, despite the enormous benefit on the battlefield.
The use of drones in warfare has been predicted for some time. At least a decade ago the USAF was experimenting with drone swarms released from pods on fighter aircraft. These military grade drones were quite expensive for the results they produced.
Drone use on both sides in the Ukraine War took off from about mid-2023 and the results have been dramatic. The Ukrainians have pulled ahead of the Russians in using drones effectively. This is because the Ukrainian drone effort is highly decentralised. Drone units on the front line negotiate directly with drone producers based in sheds and garages. This keeps the Ukrainian drone operators up-to-date with changes in frequencies and electronic warfare by the Russians. The Russian effort is hobbled by a centralised system of drone production and distribution, which is slow to respond to what is happening on the battlefield.
Ultimately, the drone problem will be kept under control by a greater investment in electronic warfare, millimetre radars, directed energy weapons, and air-burst 30 mm rounds. Just as Trophy added 30% to the cost of an Israeli tank, an effective anti-drone solution will add a similar amount to the cost of operating on the battlefield.
Figure 7: The divergence in Russian and Ukrainian first-person-view (FPV) drone hits on infantry. The red bars are Russian hits on Ukraianian infantry. The blue bars are Ukrainian hits on Russian infantry. They were pretty well neck and neck until January this year when Ukraine pulled away and Russian results went down as a result of Russian electronic warfare efforts not keeping up with the evolution of Ukrainian systems, in turn a consequence of centralised control of the Russian drone system.
The role of drones will go to being forward observers for rocket artillery from well behind the front line.
Unfortunately, the Australian Defence Force only wants to deal with Tier 1 suppliers. Therefore, there will be no innovation and flexibility, and no ability to adapt quickly to changes on the battlefield. With 3D printers and near net shape casting there is the potential to do things quickly. The cost of the laziness of Australian Defence Force acquisition people will be measured in the blood of our soldiers.
On the subject of tanks, Australia is getting a handful (75) of the gas turbine-powered Abrams tanks. Being gas-turbine powered, it has twice the fuel consumption of the German Leopard 2 tank of the same weight. The Abrams compensates for that by having a fuel tank of 1,000 litres, twice that of the Leopard 2. The problem is that the Abrams will require twice as much fuel and twice as many trucks to deliver it to the front line. And diesel will be in short supply in the coming war. We need a far greater number of tanks anyway so we might as well park up the Abrams we will be getting and make the Korean K2 Panther tank under licence in Australia instead.
Air Defence
The Ukraine War has vindicated air power theory:
- The larger force in terms of size and technology will prevail.
- The air war will last three days.
- To determine the size of your air force after the air war, calculate how many aircraft you will lose using the loss/exchange rate and the Lanchester equations.
- Longer range air-to-air missiles will push away the enemy’s aircraft.
What wasn’t predicted was that both sides would have air defence (SAM systems) strong enough to stop overflight by the enemy’s aircraft. This is very encouraging because it is a development that favours the defence, which is what we will be doing. You just have to spend enough to achieve that effect.
In mid-April Ukraine shot down a Russian bomber, a Tu-22M, from 308 km away using a missile that entered service 57 years ago. Due to a lack of artillery tubes, Russia has ordered more glide bomb attacks by Su-34 aircraft, which drop the bombs 50 km from their targets. While some of the Su-34s have been shot down, it seems that Ukrainian air defences normally don’t have enough range to protect assets within Ukrainian territory.
Australia doesn’t have any modern air defence systems. It is aware that they are necessary but hasn’t ordered any yet. The war with China may be over before any systems arrive.
Helicopters
Figure 8: Russian helicopter losses by month
Russia lost 100 helicopters in the first month of the war but the loss rate has dropped to near zero recently. This means that most have already been shot down or it is too dangerous to deploy them near the frontline where they can be useful. The evolution of electronics means that helicopters can be targeted at much greater ranges than what they are used to. For example in the Bryansk Patriot ambush of 13th May, 2023, two Mi-8 electronic warfare helicopters were shot down 120 km from the Patriot battery and 50 km inside Russian territory.
Japan has taken this lesson to heart and has parked up its fleet of Apache attack helicopters. The Australian Defence Force is in the process of acquiring 29 Apaches. What the Australian Defence Force has yet to figure out is that pop-up weapons can fire at the Apaches at greater ranges than the Apaches can fire back at them.
Figure 9: Russian helicopter shot down March 2022. The manpad that shot this helicopter down was in the tree line near where it crashed.
How to Advance on the Current Battlefield
Ukraine gave up an attempted breakthrough to the Sea of Azov in mid-2023 because its losses were too great for the small gains made. Traditional Soviet doctrine had been to have a belt of antitank mines 200 metres wide in front of your first trench. The Russians have widened that to 500 metres in places. The Ukrainians would use some artillery preparation on the trench line and then send their mine-clearing tanks forward. The Russians would then pop up from the trench line and fire ATGMS at the Ukrainian tanks. The Russians would also transfer ATGM crews from other parts of the line to the point of attempted breakthrough.
Ukraine is now on the defence and the converse holds. Russian losses now far exceed Ukrainian ones as shown by the following graphic:
Figure 10: Russian and Ukrainian material losses on 13th April, 2024. Russian losses are on the left under the orange bar, Ukrainian ones under the blue bar. Each equipment loss is a vertical bar at the bottom the graphic.
Russian losses are currently more than three times Ukrainian losses. There are signs that Russia is running out of equipment, including using infantry on motorcycles in the assault and Chinese open recreational vehicles.
Most Russian casualties are now in the force accumulation phase, a few during the assault phase, then more again during the post-assault bombardment.
The best way of assaulting Russian-held lines would be to start with GPS-guided, ground-launched thermobaric munitions which would collapse roof structures over trenches and also send pressure waves down trenches, followed by cluster rounds of smoke generators to obscure the view from the trenches. Only then follow with mine clearing vehicles cutting paths through the minefield. Some of these weapons have yet to be developed, but the technology exists for them.
David Archibald is the author of The Anticancer Garden in Australia