Cruise missile
Modern cruise missiles are capable of traveling at high subsonic, supersonic, or hypersonic speeds, are self-navigating, and are able to fly on a non-ballistic, extremely low-altitude trajectory.
Inspired by the experiments, the United States Army developed a similar flying bomb called the Kettering Bug.
[2] In the Interwar Period, Britain's Royal Aircraft Establishment developed the Larynx (Long Range Gun with Lynx Engine), which underwent a few flight tests in the 1920s.
[3] In the Soviet Union, Sergei Korolev headed the GIRD-06 cruise missile project from 1932 to 1939, which used a rocket-powered boost-glide bomb design.
Accuracy was sufficient only for use against very large targets (the general area of a city), while the range of 250 km (160 mi) was significantly lower than that of a bomber carrying the same payload.
Bomber-launched variants of the V-1 saw limited operational service near the end of the war, with the pioneering V-1's design reverse-engineered by the Americans as the Republic-Ford JB-2 cruise missile.
[6] Concurrently, the US Navy's Operation Bumblebee, was conducted at Topsail Island, North Carolina, from c. 1 June 1946, to 28 July 1948.
During the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union experimented further with the concept, of deploying early cruise missiles from land, submarines, and aircraft.
The United States Air Force's first operational surface-to-surface missile was the winged, mobile, nuclear-capable MGM-1 Matador, also similar in concept to the V-1.
On 7 November 1956, the U.S. Air Force deployed Matador units in West Germany, whose missiles were capable of striking targets in the Warsaw Pact, from their fixed day-to-day sites to unannounced dispersed launch locations.
Although the concept was proven sound and the 500-megawatt (670,000 hp) engine finished a successful test run in 1961, no airworthy device was ever completed.
Large submarines (for example, Echo and Oscar classes) were developed to carry these weapons and shadow United States battle groups at sea, and large bombers (for example, Backfire, Bear, and Blackjack models) were equipped with the weapons in their air-launched cruise missile (ALCM) configuration.
[citation needed] Examples: The most common mission for cruise missiles is to attack relatively high-value targets such as ships, command bunkers, bridges and dams.
The truck-launched versions, and also the Pershing II and SS-20 Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles, were later destroyed under the bilateral INF (Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces) treaty with the USSR.
The Royal Air Force uses the Storm Shadow cruise missile on its Typhoon and previously its Tornado GR4 aircraft.
[56][57] India in 2017 successfully flight-tested its indigenous Nirbhay ('Fearless') land-attack cruise missile, which can deliver nuclear warheads to a strike range of 1,000 km.
It has similar qualities as the Kh-55, except that its range has been extended to 5,000 km, is equipped with a 1,000 kg conventional warhead, and has stealth features which reduce its probability of intercept.
In this short time frame, the Soviet Union was working on nearly ten different types of cruise missiles.
In the 1980s the Soviet Union had developed an arsenal of cruise missiles nearing 600 platforms which consisted of land, sea, and air delivery systems.
For instance, during the 2001 strikes on Afghanistan the United States attacked targets of very low monetary value with cruise missiles, which led many to question the efficiency of the weapon.
However, proponents of the cruise missile counter that the weapon can not be blamed for poor target selection, and the same argument applies to other types of UAVs: they are cheaper than human pilots when total training and infrastructure costs are taken into account, not to mention the risk of loss of personnel.
As demonstrated in Libya in 2011 and prior conflicts, cruise missiles are much more difficult to detect and intercept than other aerial assets (reduced radar cross-section, infrared and visual signature due to smaller size), suiting them to attacks against static air defense systems.
