FP-5 FLAMINGO UPDATE

I know I could be accused of focusing too much on a single weapons platform – one that by its very nature is not a panacea for all of Ukraine’s problems.

I assure you I don’t have some Hitleresque obsession with a wonder weapon! The fact is that Ukraine stands on the cusp of possessing something that can equal and exceed what the Russians have been able to deploy against them.

That means for the first time, Ukraine will have a very long range missile in its armory capable of producing devastating results as far as the Ural Mountains covering all of industrialised western Russia. These missiles don’t even need to be deployed close to the front to be able to reach very deeply into the enemy’s territory.

These are the allegory to Russia’s air and sea launched cruise missiles that have done so much damage to Ukraine – and while fewer in number these days, they still try to do so.

It is in no small way an equalization, a strategic inflection point where the weapon and the country employing it can say they have effectively caught up with and exceeded, what their former masters can do. If that’s not a turning point I don’t know what is.

It’s also an interesting collaboration because the origin of the missile is as I have said before, British-Emirati. The propulsion system fuel and the warhead explosives are being manufactured by European allies who have gone out of their way to roll back regulations that would have gotten in the way of helping, Denmark is of particular note in this respect. They provided an old air base where the explosives factory could be quickly assembled and placed in production.

Many components are European and the Ukrainians themselves have been able to utilize a whole set of old jet engines that have been in storage for years from disassembled aircraft, refurbish them and make them as new. Eventually new will be needed but we’re not there yet.

The assembly process is typically Ukrainian – they quickly appreciated that underground and reinforced was essential, and that it’s also distributed and key parts duplicated, so that Russia can’t cripple production in a single strike.

The missile is very large and you could argue vulnerable. The jet engine is said to be noisy but at low levels by the time you hear it it’s already passing and gone out of sight.

The plan is to have it ride no more than 30-40m above the ground and it’s capable of doing so, using a mix of unjammable and unspoofable GPS, inertial navigation and TERCOM – terrain contour matching.

It’s the later that has been problematic because it requires a complex database that has to work seamlessly with everything else. There are now commercial providers of such information, and it’s not US dependent. Airbus offers a package of such data derived from its many satellites and others do to. It’s this that’s currently one of the many processes that require ironing out before full utilization and production begin in January.

At the moment the missile is publicly admitted to be flying at around 114m, but that remains too high. At around $500,000-750,000 per unit you cannot afford to take unnecessary risks. Russia has virtually zero AWACS capability these days, and only the most sophisticated AESA look-down capable radars – of which Russia has almost none on its fighters, have even a chance of seeing the missile at 30m. Given that its below the radar coverage of the anti-air systems Russia does possess, other than a last minute point defence system and some luck, given its speed, there’s little likely to be able to stop it.

The original warhead size was said to be up to 1,500kg but now seems to be 1,150kg, – still 11 times more than the FP-2 drone. Add to that given its likely employment of blast fragmentation or cluster warheads, it’s going to be devastating.

Imagine a flock of ten of these on one of the larger Russian refineries all arriving within seconds of each other – they’re going to make such a pretty picture. I know I’m not the only one looking forward to it. Jake Broe, Jonathan MS Pearce of ATP, and many, many others are all desperate to see Russia face what it has so willingly dished out.

Russian arrogance and the assumption (you know how much I loathe assumption excuses), there was absolutely no way this was going to happen – because nobody expected the war to last so long, is about to come back to haunt them. They thought this could never happen to them. They assumed only they were sophisticated enough to produce these weapons and use them. Putin, the strategic genius yet again, wrong about so much.

While we’re on the subject of missiles the recent Russian Sarmat ICBM test that failed is the second one in a year. The last one blew up in the silo and erased it from the surface of the Earth. This one hurled itself up into the air on its gas canister for the cold launch system – but it seemed to remain attached to it as it ignited the main motors, the strain separated the first stage from the second and third, sending the third stage off several kilometers into a step curve but the upper stages of the missile just flipped over and smacked into the ground leaving a huge purple fireball and mushroom cloud of partially burned chemicals from the solid fuel.

I think we can safely say that Russian ICBM’s are not in good nick. As many as 50% could in fact be unusable but it still leaves too many that are. Ironically until 2014 the missiles were repaired and maintained under contract by Ukraine – because that’s where the were all built, but after Crimea that stopped. Russian strategic missile developments have been very limited since then and mostly concentrated on small upgrades and an attempt at backwards engineering old systems. Their reliability must be questioned.

And if that wasn’t a sign of decline the launch of a manned rocket was carried out from Baikonar only for the entire launch assembly gantry to collapse and fall into the blast pit. Russia has no means of sending up manned spacecraft now until it’s fixed, which given current military priorities looks like never.

The Analyst

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