Coming Soon — Containerized Missiles on Russian Warships

By Robert Beckhusen,War Is Boring

Russia’s military spending cannot match the Kremlin’s ambitions. Western sanctions and low gas prices forced a 20-percent cut to the Russian military budget in 2017, bedeviling a host of military projects. However, Russia is looking at cheap and easy ways to equip its forces — particularly the navy — with sophisticated weapons.

Specifically, modular weapons that can easily swap in and out of different ships — with the most well-known example being Club-K anti-ship missiles hidden inside shipping containers, which Russia offers for sale to export customers. Any coastal defense force on a budget can have a well-camouflaged warship killer hidden in a civilian port.

But Russian developments in this regard are more extensive including anti-submarine warfare and anti-aircraft modules and their accompanying sensors.

The Kremlin wants a wide variety of naval hardware to be easily portable — and transportable — given the military’s strapped resources and multiple fleets: Northern, Baltic, Black Sea and Pacific. This is a historic problem that has prevented Russia from concentrating its naval forces going back to the Russo-Japanese War.

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Packing weapons and sensors in containers moved by rail cannot solve this problem, but can it by rapidly converting non-military container ships into floating missile platforms and submarine hunters in the event of a war — “surging” equipment and weapons from one fleet to another depending on need.

In addition, these weapons can support new classes of lighter vessels — such as the Project 22160-class patrol ship, which has an internal space below the helicopter deck perfectly suited to packing pop-up containerized weapons and other systems. A small corvette with 300-kilometer-range Kh-35 missiles can outrange and overpower a much more expensive U.S. Littoral Combat Ship.