Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States
Appendix III: Unclassified Working Papers


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Dennis M. Gormley 1 : "Transfer Pathways for Cruise Missiles" Although the Commission was established to examine the ballistic missile threat to the United States, it is important to note that NIE 95-19 ("Emerging Missile Threats to North America During the Next 15 Years") included some consideration of alternative ways of threatening the United States with missiles--namely, through the acquisition of land-attack cruise missiles launched from ships. This paper focuses on such a possibility. After a brief summary of how this threat was treated in NIE 95-19 and in the Gates Panel's subsequent evaluation of NIE 95-19, the paper turns to a discussions of reasons why cruise missiles might offer an attractive alternative or complement to the acquisition of ballistic missiles for delivery of weapons of mass destruction. The paper then sketches out the various transfer pathways for acquiring land-attack cruise missiles and concludes with some observations on the challenges of monitoring such activity and a prognosis of what might occur in the years ahead. 2 NIE 95-19 and the Gates Panel NIE 95-19 examined the worldwide proliferation of cruise missiles because of the possibility of their being launched from forward-based ships off the coast of the United States. It concluded that by 2005, hostile adversaries of the United States will probably acquire land-attack cruise missiles for regional missions. The NIE further judged that an attack by cruise missiles launched from ships off the US coast was technically feasible, but unlikely. 3 The Gates Panel believed that while the Intelligence Community had made a strong case for why the United States is unlikely to face an ICBM threat from a developing nation before 2010, it also concluded that not nearly enough attention was being devoted to the possibility that land-attack cruise missiles could be launched from ships within several hundred kilometers of US territory. 4 Attractive Features of Cruise Missiles Today, largely due to the success of export controls, acquiring ballistic missiles is becoming more complex and costly than developing or buying cruise missiles. Since the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) was established in 1987, the major industrial powers rarely provide the kind of systematic aid considered essential to complete indigenous ballistic missile programs in the developing world. 5 Even though the MTCR applies equally to ballistic and cruise missiles, there have been far fewer control efforts devoted to cruise than to ballistic missiles. This is largely due to the fact that the MTCR intentionally avoids controlling manned aircraft and related components, which are fundamentally interchangeable with unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) or cruise missiles. Until recently, policymakers and analysts have been right to focus on ballistic--rather than cruise--missile proliferation. Most aerodynamic missiles produced since the Nazi V-1 are for attacking ships and airplanes or for defending coastal areas. Over 70 countries, 40 of them in the developing world, possess over 75,000 anti-ship cruise missiles, most with ranges under 100 km. Only a dozen countries have land-attack cruise missiles approaching the quality of the US. Tomahawk . This is primarily because tight export controls have effectively prevented the spread of highly accurate guidance schemes like Terrain Contour Matching (TERCOM) systems or Digital Scene-Matching Area Correlator (DSMAC) systems. But a stark new reality is changing the face of cruise missile proliferation: military breakthroughs are increasingly resulting from commercial rather than secret military research. Nowhere are the consequences of this more evident than in the unencumbered flow of the enabling technologies needed to develop highly accurate land-attack cruise missiles. Chief among these new commercial technologies are cheap guidance and navigation systems based on the US Global Positioning System (GPS), whose use during Operation Desert Storm gave a brief glimpse of the revolutionary changes now underway in warfare. Combined with commercially available mission-planning tools and one-meter resolution satellite imagery to target fixed objects, new guidance and navigation technology for cruise missiles offers substantially more accurate delivery (by at least a factor of ten) and costs notably less (by a half or more) than far more complex--and export-controlled--ballistic missile guidance systems. Before the advent of these new technologies, developing states had little incentive to develop or acquire inaccurate land-attack cruise missiles, particularly when the former Soviet Union was so generously dispensing Scuds and related production wherewithal to its clients. In addition to militarily significant accuracy in delivery, land-attack cruise missiles offer other compelling operational advantages when compared to existing and prospective ballistic missiles. Cruise missiles can be placed in canisters, making them fairly easy to maintain and operate in harsh environments. Their relatively compact size permits more flexible launch options, more mobility for ground-launched versions, and a smaller logistics burden, which could make them even less susceptible to counterforce targeting than Iraqi Scuds were during Operation Desert Storm. Moreover, cruise missiles need not be stabilized at their launch points and can be launched from commercial ships and aircraft, as well as from ground launchers. Perhaps most important of all, the cruise missile's aerodynamic stability makes it an inherently easier and cheaper platform from which to deliver and disperse chemical and biological agents. The lethal area for a given quantity of biological agent delivered by a cruise missile can be at least ten times greater than that delivered by a ballistic missile. Transfer Pathways for Acquiring Land-Attack Cruise Missiles The first pathway--indigenous development--is clearly the longest route to a militarily significant arsenal of land-attack cruise missiles, especially for developing countries without any supporting aircraft industry. Perhaps the most powerful factor fostering a slow, incremental improvement in indigenous capability is the increasing globalization of the civilian aircraft industry, which has spread aircraft maintenance and even some production capability to various parts of the developing world. And because of the manned aircraft loopholes in the MTCR, it is fairly easy to acquire critical component technologies for cruise missiles. On the other hand, no matter how widespread the availability of key enabling technologies, what makes indigenous manufacturing so time-consuming is developing the capacity to integrate components into complex systems that produce repeatable results according to demanding specifications. There is a distinct shortage of such systems engineering talent outside the major industrial powers. The second pathway to acquiring land-attack cruise missiles derives from the conversion of existing anti-ship cruise missiles (ASCMs) or UAVs into land-attack cruise missiles. While UAVs for reconnaissance are fairly widespread and provide useful building blocks for land-attack systems, more ubiquitous ASCMs, of which there is a worldwide inventory today of roughly 75,000, furnish a more likely basis for conversion. Of the world's inventory only a portion are appropriate candidates for conversion, if ranges greater than 300 km are desired. This is because modern ASCMs are densely packed with electronics and software and frequently are propelled by ramjet engines, all of which leaves little room for changing engines, adding fuel, or rearranging avionics. More appropriate candidates are larger and simpler ASCMs like the Russian Styx and its Chinese derivatives in the Silkworm family. Like the Scud family of ballistic missiles, the Silkworm family has proliferated globally and several recipients are reportedly working on extending the range of their existing models. To transform larger ASCMs like Silkworm would entail structural modifications (e.g., producing simple partitions between internal compartments and riveting simply shaped aluminum plates to increase the missile length slightly) and the replacement of the original autopilot and avionics with a combined satellite navigation receiver and inertial measurement unit. The most direct route to transforming an ASCM into a much longer-range land-attack missile (500 to 700 km) would be to use the Chinese turbojet powered HY-4 Silkworm , which China currently offers for export. Earlier Silkworm versions, the widely proliferated HY-1 and HY-2, could also be converted, but their liquid-fueled engines would have to be replaced with a suitable turbojet engine like the one in China's HY-4 ASCM. There are other unrestricted turbojet engines available from Canadian, European, Japanese, and US manufacturers of civilian and military aircraft. A converted Silkworm , with a length of between 7.4 and just under 9 meters (depending on the number of additional fuel plugs for range extension), can readily fit inside a standard 12-meter shipping container. Thousands of commercial container ships comprise the international fleet. US ports alone handle over 13 million containers annually. The third and most worrisome pathway for acquiring land-attack cruise missiles is direct purchase from major industrial suppliers. The MTCR is most restrictive in treating missiles carrying 500 kg payloads to ranges of 300 km or more. MTCR members are urged to make a "strong presumption to deny" exports meeting this range/payload threshold. But most of the MTCR's implementation experience relates to determining the range and payload of ballistic, not cruise missiles. Determining which cruise missiles meet the MTCR's range/payload threshold is more complex than it is for ballistic missiles. It is easier to change a cruise missile's range and payload to achieve performance enhancements. Variations in cruise missile flight profiles--particularly taking advantage of flight at higher altitudes--can lead to substantially longer ranges than those nominally given for low-altitude flights. What's more, from a purely engineering standpoint, it is much easier to "scale up" the range of an existing cruise missile than that of a ballistic missile. Confusion over the MTCR's lack of precision in determining cruise missile range may explain France's recent decision to offer the Apache air-launched cruise missile to the United Arab Emirates, despite strong protest by the United States. 6 Under development since 1989, the Apache is modular in design and will be produced in several variants, all of which use the same airframe. The short-range variant, which is the apparent export version, has a nominal range of 140 km with a payload of 520 kg, which seems to place it under the MTCR's 300-km-range/500-kg-payload threshold. But by taking advantage of a higher flight altitude for a portion of its overall flight, Apache's short-range variant appears readily capable of comfortably exceeding a range of 300 km with its 520 kg payload, which would make Apache a Category 1 missile. Range variations aside, the Apache has a stealthy aerodynamic shape, low-observable materials, low infrared signatures and a combination of guidance and navigational schemes designed to achieve a high terminal accuracy and high system survivability. France's decision to breech the MTCR's most restrictive provision is likely to influence the behavior of other key exporting states, especially other MTCR members and adherents. Russia has already offered a shorter-range version of the 3,000-km-range AS-15 strategic cruise missile at the 1992 Moscow Air Show. Seeing strong export potential for cruise missiles, the Spanish company CASA has announced its intention to build an Apache look-alike entirely relying on commercial off-the-shelf technologies to bring costs down substantially. Israel, with Chinese financial assistance, is said to be transforming its Delilah UAV into a 400-km-range air-launched cruise missile. And with Russian technical assistance, China is reportedly developing a land-attack cruise missile for both theater and strategic missions. Unless the MTCR's members achieve greater consensus on cruise missile exports, the direct purchase of advanced land-attack cruise missiles may become the major pathway for acquiring land-attack cruise missiles. Monitoring Challenges Developing a ballistic missile involves discrete sequential steps that become increasingly demanding in terms of the skill and time required for missiles over 1,000-km range. Because testing is so critical for ballistic missiles generally, and long-range systems especially, and so easy to detect, NIE 95-19 concluded that the intelligence community could give decisionmakers at least five years' warning of the deployment of a new ICBM. Comparable warning time would very likely not be available in monitoring cruise missile developments. Cruise missile development programs would be comparably easier and less detectable than developing ICBMs because there is no need to test large rocket motors. Moreover, because the MTCR intentionally avoids restricting manned aircraft sales and production, developing countries could intermingle cruise missile developments with legitimate aircraft purchases or production, making detection more problematic. Difficulty in its detection is not the only reason why cruise missile development will be difficult to monitor. While ballistic missile improvements tend to unfold sequentially over time, several levels of cruise missile capability--including both early missile designs and advanced missiles with stealth features--could emerge virtually simultaneously. Indeed, if MTCR problems in restricting the sale of advanced land-attack cruise missiles are not rectified, such systems could appear in developing world arsenals even before indigenously produced missiles or transformed anti-ship systems emerge within the next decade A Prognosis If ground rules for determining the range and payload of cruise missiles are not agreed upon by MTCR member states, it is highly likely that direct transfers of Category 1 missiles to non-MTCR member states will occur within the next few years. Moreover, without tighter controls on low-observable technologies and engines for cruise missiles, more sophisticated systems are likely to become available to non-MTCR states within the same timeframe. However, the range of these systems will probably not exceed 1,000 km, making them primarily a regional threat. As for whether or not an adversary of the United States might be motivated to acquire a regional-range land-attack cruise missile to threaten US territory from ships, it would appear that the Department of Defense believes the threat sufficient to warrant some level of attention. In the May 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review, the report notes that the Department plans to turn some of its theater cruise missile defense program to the problem of US territorial defense. 7 At the very least, one ought to be careful about making broad generalizations concerning whether or not such a shipborne cruise missile threat is or is not likely to emerge. Although it is true that many developed and developing nations have long seen ballistic missiles as according them significant military status because of their perceived offensive capability and assured penetration, the success of the US Tomahawk cruise missile in both Operation Desert Storm and Bosnia has heightened interest in cruise missile acquisition. Moreover, the addition of stealth to a land-attack cruise missile essentially gives it similar characteristics of ballistic missiles that originally gave impetus to the MTCR's creation--difficulty of defense, short-warning time, and shock effect. Certainly, the existence of a tested and serially produced ICBM force would furnish a much stronger deterrent than the possible existence of a small force of shipborne cruise missiles; yet, the later force might appeal to a state or terrorist organization motivated simply by offensive objectives. The key point, however, is that there are likely to be variations among nations in their motivations for seeking to acquire ICBMs and/or shipborne cruise missiles to threaten the United States. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 1. Dennis Gormley is the Vice President and head, Defense Policy Group, Pacific-Sierra Research Corporation (PSR). Frequently serves on U.S. DoD advisory committees, most recently chairing a 1997 Summer Study for the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy on Nuclear Weapons and the Revolution in Military Affairs. 2. For a more detailed treatment of the impact of cruise missile proliferation on US security interests, see Dennis M. Gormley, "Hedging Against the Cruise-Missile Threat," Survival , vol. 40, no. 1, Spring 1998, pp. 92-111. 3. Statement for the Record by Richard N. Cooper, Chairman, National Intelligence Council, for Hearings of the House National Security Committee, 28 February 1996. 4. For a detailed appraisal of NIE 95-19, see Foreign Missile Threats: Analytic Soundness of Certain National Intelligence Estimates (Washington DC: US Government Accounting Office, August 1996). On the Gates Panel's treatment of the cruise missile threat, see "Intel Official Defends Validity of Controversial Missile Threat Estimate," Inside Missile Defense, vol. 2, no. 25, 11 December 1996, pp. 1, 10-14. 5. China's apparent aid to Pakistan's development of the Ghuari ballistic missile seems to be the exception. 6. Paul Beaver, "USA angry over French decision to export Apache," Jane's Defence Weekly, April 8, 1998. 7. William S. Cohen, Report of the Quadrennial Defense Review , May 1997, Section VII. See http://www.defenselink.mil/pubs/qdr.


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