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LearningTranscript
00:00This video is sponsored by Masterworks.
00:05Why do the Russians have so many cruise missiles of so many different models?
00:15It doesn't seem normal, doesn't it?
00:17After all, the United States has no more than a handful.
00:21The Russians, though, have an entire zoo.
00:24While some time ago I was reading the news about the Russian reaction to the attack to the Crimean bridge,
00:34a question sprang up in my mind and I actually realized that I didn't know the answer.
00:41Why do the Russians have so many cruise missiles of so many different models?
00:48It doesn't seem normal, doesn't it?
00:52After all, the United States has no more than a handful.
00:56The AGM-86, the BGM-109, the JASM and the LRASM,
01:01that may be considered maybe two different versions of the same weapon,
01:05the oldish SLAMYAR and the venerable HARPOON.
01:10Then, of course, there are plenty of air-to-ground or anti-ship missiles in service,
01:16but they either are not real cruise weapons,
01:19or their range is so short that, yeah, they're basically tactical weapons.
01:25I'm not considering them in this video.
01:27So, for example, a TOW missile is technically a cruise weapon,
01:31but its use is eminently tactical.
01:33The Russians, though, have an entire zoo.
01:36The KH-101 and 102,
01:39the 3M-54 Calibre in all its variants,
01:43the KH-55 and the KH-555,
01:47the KH-59,
01:49the couple 9M-728 and 729,
01:53launched from the Scander-K,
01:55the P-600, P-700, P-800,
01:58the old but still in service KH-22,
02:02the anti-radiation KH-31,
02:05and the brand new hypersonic Zircon.
02:07Each of these has at least a couple of variants,
02:11and there are more in development,
02:13and I'm surely forgetting so many,
02:15that, yeah, you get the point.
02:19Technically the Iranian loitering munitions Shaheed-136 are cruise missiles, sir.
02:26I appreciate that you didn't call them suicide drones.
02:30While US weapons are all subsonic,
02:33the Russians have subsonic, supersonic,
02:36and more recently hypersonic cruise missiles.
02:39While US weapons are actually specialized weapons,
02:42many of the Russian anti-ship and anti-radiation missiles
02:46have a secondary capability to attack ground targets.
02:51So there is a big difference between the American approach,
02:53the European approach, which is sort of similar to the American,
02:57and the Russian approach.
02:59And the question is, why is it?
03:02And this is not an irrelevant question,
03:04because it may be an important point
03:07to understand what the Russians are doing now,
03:10and in this in particular relation with their air force.
03:14So tormented by this interrogative,
03:17the first thing that I did was to turn to the fountain of all knowledge.
03:21Wikipedia!
03:23Wikipedia
03:35Yes, I know, I know, Wikipedia is definitely not authoritative,
03:39but to do a research is definitely a good place to start.
03:43And particularly when they present all those long lists of weapons
03:48that often have some references,
03:51some footnotes that point you to other interesting source material.
03:56However, the first thing I looked for was the actual definition of cruise missile.
04:01Wikipedia says a cruise missile is a guided missile
04:05used against terrestrial or naval targets
04:09that remain in the atmospheres
04:11and fly the major portion of its flight path
04:15at approximately constant speed.
04:19Which is surprisingly correct.
04:21The rationale for cruise missiles is penetration into air defenses,
04:25usually at low altitude and at relatively long range.
04:31Actually, someone could argue that the Meteor or the AMRAAM-D
04:34are some form of air-to-air cruise missiles,
04:37but let's not go into that rabbit hole, ok?
04:43However, the long Wikipedia lists came handy.
04:46The American list of cruise missiles is interesting,
04:49but the Soviet and the Russian list, well, it is very, very long.
04:55There was a moment in the 50s and 60s
04:58when more than 10 different types were in service or being developed.
05:04And this is odd, because it seems that you are actually dispersing your resources.
05:10So, why the Soviets did that?
05:17Why the Soviets did that?
05:24I went to bed mulling this question,
05:26but when I woke up, an idea had appeared in my mind.
05:30I went back to consult old scripts of old videos about the Soviet naval aviation.
05:37There, I found that in the 50s, when Stalin was still alive,
05:41the Soviet Union made the strategic choice of not confronting the United States at sea.
05:48The Soviet Navy was supposed to deny the United States the control of those waters
05:54that could influence a land campaign,
05:57but they were not going to challenge the overall control of the sea lanes.
06:02And to do so, the first asymmetric Soviet choice was made
06:07to rely on big and fast anti-ship missiles rather than on carriers and their aircraft.
06:14And since those missiles had to evade the air defenses,
06:18they either had to fly low or fly fast, or possibly both.
06:22And obviously, they were all, in a form or another, cruise missiles.
06:27This choice, though, was not exclusive of maritime operations.
06:31During the entire Cold War, the Soviet doctrine was to use long-range weapons
06:37to attack targets at any depth behind the front line or at sea,
06:42rather than executing deep piloted strikes in enemy territory.
06:47Air penetration might still have been necessary,
06:50but the air-launched weapons range was expected to be used to the maximum extent possible.
06:56However, this was not a direct answer to the original question,
07:00why there were so many variants.
07:14Actually, in this light, having so many variants is no longer that surprising.
07:19If the Soviets placed such a heavy reliance on these long-range weapons,
07:24it is sort of natural that a lot of resources were dedicated to their development.
07:31From this point of view, it is not that surprising.
07:33Look at the American production of tactical aircraft in those years.
07:37It is also interesting to notice that some of the anti-ship weapons being produced in those years
07:43were given a secondary land attack capability.
07:47The reason why this is probably a spin-off of the desired capability of attacking ships in port.
07:52After the fall of Soviet Union, all these big weapons have been inherited by Russia,
07:57but since then there are other forces at work to shape the landscape.
08:01In fact, the first point to address was the qualitative gap
08:04that grew in the 80s and early 90s at an alarming pace.
08:08The second point was that the numerical superiority was simply gone.
08:14The third was that the place in the world of Russia was different than the place of the Soviet Union.
08:20So the mission of the armed forces of the Russian Federation
08:24was different than the mission of the forces of the Soviet Union.
08:28And with different missions may come different weapons.
08:31But if this was the case, what we might have expected was a formal rationalization.
08:39We might have expected that Russia would have decommissioned these old weapons
08:45and replaced them with new models, more modern, effective and efficient.
08:50We now know that this didn't really happen, but why?
09:04I have some friends who are professionals and they are experts on this subject
09:09and after some furious WhatsApp exchanges in Italian
09:13a picture started to emerge.
09:16When Russia had to redefine its doctrine, particularly in relation to the air force,
09:22their doctrine became eminently defensive.
09:26Yeah, I know that it sounds odd in the light of what is happening now,
09:31but please bear with me.
09:33Russia knows very well that a lot of Western doctrine is based on air power.
09:37In the context of the NATO alliance, actually nothing serious happens if there is no air superiority.
09:44At the time they also knew that they were catching up technologically with the West
09:50and they couldn't achieve the numeric parity anymore.
09:55So they based their idea to neutralize the Western air power on two elements
10:02where they already knew that they had, if not a technological advantage, at least a good position.
10:10Integrated air defenses and long-range weapons.
10:14No peer-to-peer fight for air superiority unless strictly necessary.
10:19No time-on-target deep strikes and closer support better left to helicopters.
10:25Rather keep the fighters safe behind the ground-based air defenses,
10:30use the air-to-ground capabilities not far from the front line or exclusively where there is no opposition,
10:39and, most critically, leave deep strike and suppression of air defenses to long-range weapons.
10:46So the Americans developed stealth to penetrate the air defenses, destroy them and acquire air superiority.
10:53The Russians planned to neutralize the opponent's offensive capabilities in depth by using long-range weapons.
11:01And this actually expanded beyond the air force because it prompted the development of cruise missiles based on land or ship-borne.
11:11So it was clear that they had to step up a bit with these long-range weapons
11:16and while these new weapons were being designed, tested, built, acquired and put in service,
11:24there were still a lot of legacy weapons.
11:28While the Russians conceptually hardly throw anything away,
11:32but in this case they had something to fill in for the new generation of weapons.
11:37And since the replacement has not been completed before February 2022,
11:42this is the reason why we are seeing this zoo of different old and legacy weapons in Ukraine.
11:49So there you have it.
12:03This large variety is the result of these two different eras of development of different types of cruise missiles.
12:12When it was clear that the conflict was not going to end soon,
12:15the Russians started using the old weapons to save the newer ones for high pain targets.
12:21It is really difficult to have reliable estimates,
12:24but it seems that the Russians have sort of 50% of their stock of modern weapons still available.
12:33The fact that they are using old weapons, almost obsolete or even imported very simple weapons,
12:40speaks volumes about the fact that they are going to preserve their best weapons for the future
12:46or for a possible escalation of the war.
12:50And we must also remember that most of the Russian missiles are also capable of carrying nuclear warheads.
12:58So some of them need to be saved in case, God forbid, of a nuclear escalation.
13:06However, from the Russian side, there is no sparing of resources at all.
13:10As I said, it is extremely difficult to calculate weapon by weapon what was the expenditure in Ukraine.
13:16However, the Italian analyst Andrea Gaspardo actually calculated that adding all the long-range weapons,
13:22cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, anti-radiation missiles, repurposed surface-to-air missiles,
13:28enemy-sized loitering munitions, everything, the Russians used an average of 100 to 120 long-range weapons every day.
13:38And this is it.
13:40You are forgetting an important element, sir. The one you always talk about.
13:44Ah, you mean that thing?
13:48Yes, sir. That thing as you are bizarrely expressing this articulate concept.
13:53Well, I hate saying this, but Otis is right. There is another important point.
14:06Variety means resilience.
14:09What can be used successfully against one weapon may not be as successful against another.
14:17The family of ship-launched Kalibr cruise missiles, probably the most effective and most modern weapons available to Russia in this category,
14:26has been designed and built by Novator.
14:30It entered service in 1995, but the large-scale deployment was in the mid-2000s.
14:36So, they are definitely not old, and the newest versions are considered very capable.
14:42The Kh-101, a semi-stealth long-range air-launched cruise missile that entered in service in the mid-2000s as well,
14:51is designed and built by Raduga OKB.
14:55It is considered the best long-range weapon available to the Russian bomber fleet,
15:01even though some NATO reports show that it may have some accuracy issues.
15:07Raduga also builds the light Kh-59, which has been used in Ukraine by tactical aircraft.
15:14A new version of the same missile has been developed to be stealth and fit inside the base of the Sukhoi-57,
15:21and there are unconfirmed news of its successful use in Ukraine.
15:25The cruise missiles 9M728 and 9M729 are both launched by the Iskander-K launcher.
15:33They are ground-based, and they have a very long range.
15:37They too are quite modern, and despite the fact that the entire system in this case is built by Novator,
15:45it seems that one model is a Kaliber derivation and the other is a Kh-101 derivation.
15:53And I could go on for hours describing other manufacturers and other weapons, and maybe one day I will do it.
16:01We could talk about MPO, KRTV, all the missiles of the supersonic families, the new hypersonic Zircon, and so on.
16:11Now, these weapons are all different.
16:15They all have different ancestries.
16:18They are designed and built by different people.
16:21They have different performances, different components, different guidance, different algorithms.
16:28Each one of them may require some very specific countermeasures to counter it.
16:36What may work against one may not work against the other.
16:40Terminal guidance, the terminal maneuvers, the penetration aids are all different,
16:45and they may require different approaches to defend against.
16:48Just the existence of such a variety is a definite headache for whoever is at the receiving end.
16:57I certainly would not like to be at the receiving end,
17:00but I would be more than willing to be at the receiving end of this video's sponsor, Masterworks.
17:06If there's a lesson we could take from today's video,
17:10well, it's that putting together a worthy collection means covering all bases.
17:15Whether you're building a literal arsenal of weapons or an investing portfolio,
17:21you have to be prepared for each and every possibility.
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17:28you can see protecting your savings has never been more important.
17:32The stock market, real estate, cryptocurrency, all are under fire,
17:36for reasons mostly outside of our control.
17:39So what can the average investor do when saving money isn't enough anymore?
17:44Well, Investing 101 tells you to diversify, and again, cover all bases.
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18:11Demand has gotten so high that even amidst the economic freefall,
18:16the average painting is selling for 26% more at auction than this time last year.
18:23But this isn't just a flash in the pan.
18:25Contemporary art has outpaced the Standard & Poor's 500 over the last 26 years by 131%.
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19:19But Millenium7 subscribers can skip the waitlist at the link in the description.
19:25So if you are still here at this point of the video, thank you very much for your attention and your time.
19:31And thank you very much from the deep of my heart to all those who are supporting the channel
19:35by being members on Patreon or by one-off donations.
19:39Thank you very much to Masterworks for making this video possible.
19:43In the meanwhile, thank you very much for watching.
19:46Click on the videos that are going to appear beside me, and see you next time.