TE - PGMs CK July 04

The arrival of large numbers of potent Sukhoi fighters in the Asia Pacific region has attracted the attention of analysts and media alike. Less visible but no less important is the recent proliferation across the region of Russian and indigenous precision guided munitions (PGMs). In many respects the Sukhois are both a delivery vehicle and marketing vehicle for Russian cruise missiles, standoff missiles and guided bombs. With Russian and indigenous PGMs now finding their way on to all manner of regional fighters, over the next decade Asia Pacific is likely to end up with a larger aggregate warstock of modern PGMs than that held by the European NATO nations. What is no less important is that many Russian PGM sales involve technology transfer via licence assembly or mass production, which given historical precedents could see many of these munitions in regional production runs lasting decades. Once established in production, regional manufacturers will follow the well established pattern of tweaking the designs, spawning in turn a wide range of derivative weapons with various design improvements. China’s evolution of the Russian P-15/P-21 Styx/Silkworm and 9K32/HN-5 Grail present excellent case studies. Electronic and optical countermeasures to these evolved and evolving weapons will present a problem in their own right. The emergence over time of large warstocks of modern PGMs in Asia Pacific will fundamentally change the strategic balance across the region as the decisive advantage held by US aligned regional nations with existing PGM warstocks will be narrowed if not eliminated eventually. Major regional players like India and China observed the Desert Storm, Desert Fox, Allied Force, Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom campaigns very carefully and the lesson they carried away is much the same as articulated by Australia’s existing doctrine – PGMs are decisive war winners. Lesser regional players in turn emulate these major players. Asia today sees military power primarily in terms of modern air and missile power, and budgets permitting, we are seeing a pattern of investment directly copied from that followed by the US – air forces getting what they want ahead of naval surface fleets and armies. The commodification of modern computing and imaging technologies will see increasing use in Russian and indigenous designs of third generation microprocessor, signal processor and imaging chips. With technology controls now largely nonviable, as Asian nations become subcontract manufacturers for western consumer technology giants, we can expect to see increasing use of chips such as the Pentium and TMS320 in weapon seekers. Similarly the unrestricted availability of good open source software development tools will see regional PGMs rival the capabilities of US, European and Israeli products over the next decade – nobody has a monopoly on brains in this game. Basic guidance/navigation technologies like Kalman filters, digital scene matching area correlators (DSMAC) and terrain contour matching (TERCOM) have been mastered by the Russians and more recently China, with India easily having equal engineering talent for this. Russia is now developing state-of-the-art QWIP thermal imaging arrays. by Dr Carlo Kopp T E C H N O L O G Y