Israel's effective use of air-launched ballistic missiles in its airstrikes on Iran is expected to spark interest elsewhere in acquiring these weapons, which most major powers have avoided in favor of cruise missiles and glide bombs.
The Israeli military said the Oct. 26 attack took out Iranian missile factories and air defenses in three waves of strikes. Investigators said that based on satellite images, the targets included buildings once used in Iran's nuclear program.
Tehran defends such targets with “a wide variety” of anti-aircraft systems, said Justin Bronk, an air force and technology expert at London's Royal United Services Institute.
Cruise missiles are easier targets for dense, integrated air defense than ballistic missiles. But ballistic missiles are often fired from known launch points, and most cannot change course in flight.
Experts say fast, high-precision air-launched ballistic missiles, such as the Israel Aerospace Industries Rampage, could avoid the problems faced by ground-based ballistic missiles and air-launched cruise missiles – weapons that use small wings to travel long distances and maintain height.
“The main advantage of an ALBM over an ALCM is the speed with which it can penetrate the defense line,” said Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in California. “The disadvantage, the accuracy, seems to have been largely resolved.”
Ground-launched ballistic missiles — which Iran has used twice this year to attack Israel, and which both Ukraine and Russia have used since Russia's 2022 invasion — are common in many countries' arsenals. This also applies to cruise missiles.
Because ALBMs are transported by air, their launch points are flexible, which helps strike planners.
“The advantage is that they can be launched from the air and come from any direction, which complicates the task of defending against them,” said Uzi Rubin, a senior researcher at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, one of the architects of Israeli missile defense. .
The weapons are not invulnerable to air defense. In Ukraine, Lockheed Martin Patriot PAC-3 missiles have repeatedly intercepted Russia's Khinzhals.
Many countries, including the United States and Great Britain, experimented with ALBMs during the Cold War. It is known that only Israel, Russia and China are now using the weapons.
The US tested a hypersonic ALBM, the Lockheed Martin AGM-183, but it did not receive funding until fiscal year 2025. Because the country has a large arsenal of cruise missiles and other types of long-range weapons, Washington has otherwise shown little interest in ALBMs.
A U.S. Air Force official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said ALBMs are not used in Air Force operations.
Raytheon's SM-6, an air defense missile repurposed for air-to-air and surface-to-surface missions, has also been tested as an air-launched anti-ship weapon, a senior US defense technical analyst said. who declined to be identified because the matter is sensitive.
In tests, the missile was able to hit a small target on land that represented a destroyer's center of mass, the analyst said. Publicly, the SM-6 is not intended for air-to-ground attacks.
Because ALBMs are essentially a combination of guidance weapons, warheads and rocket motors, many countries with precision weapons already have the capability to pursue them, a defense industry executive said on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter.
“This is a smart way to turn a common set of technologies and components into a very interesting new weapon that gives them many more capabilities and therefore options at a reasonable price,” said the director.
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