This article at The Drive by Tyler Rogoway and Ivan Voukadinov has enough good stuff in it for about three posts. I’ve changed the title of this post five times and don’t know what I find more interesting in it, the discussion of the Russian support for the multi-seat heavy fighter in to the future, or the cold-water in your face discussion of anti-satellite weapons.
Maybe I’ll come back the MIG-25 to MIG-31 to MIG-41 arch, but for now I’ll let you just read that part of the article on your own. Let’s instead focus on the last topic – anti-satellite weapons delivered by heavy fighters.
Russia’s recent adaptation of their Iskander tactical ballistic missile into an air-launched weapon made major headlines and was among the least technologically reaching of Putin’s new cadre of superweapons that are supposedly in development. The carrier aircraft for that weapon, named ‘Kinzhal,’ is MiG-31 Foxhound interceptor. The MiG-31, which evolved out of the MiG-25 Foxbat, has the ability to carry heavy loads to high altitudes and at very speeds approaching mach three. This makes it an ideal launch platform not just for ballistic missiles meant to strike targets on the surface of the earth, but also for small suborbital or even orbital payloads, and especially direct-ascent anti-satellite weapons. On September 14th, 2018 what appears to be just such a launch system was photographed at Zhukovsky Airport outside of Moscow by aviation photographer ShipSash.
This would not be the first time the MiG-31 has been used in an anti-satellite project. More than 30 years ago, in January 1987, the MiG-31D (“article 07”), which was the carrier of the 79M6 anti-satellite missile, made its first flight. The aircraft and missiles were elements of the anti-satellite weapon 30P6 ‘Kontakt’ system. The rocket was developed by KB Vympel. The project was largely a response to the United States’ own direct ascent air-launched anti-satellite missile system, the ASM-135, that used a modified F-15 called the Celestial Eagle as a launch platform. The weapon was successfully tested in 1985.
Here is why it makes sense that Russia would get back up on step with anti-satellite capabilities. In the post-Cold War environment the United States military got fat, dumb, lazy, and entitled about our access to the once hotly contested electromagnetic spectrum. In parallel, by the late 1990s we assumed that we would always have access to whatever secure broadband satellite data bandwidth we could either put up or buy up in the EHF and UHF spectrum. We designed entire platforms and CONOPS around “Network Centric Warfare” that assumed away an opponent’s ability to prevent full access to both for voice, date, and navigation.
Simple, open-minded Critical Capability Analysis shows this act of hubris on our part opened up a wide and poorly defended gap in our lines that leads directly to the core enabler of our forces to fight.
Having a tactical asset like the MiG-31 that is able to take down satellites by surprise from pretty much any location that Russia has access to doesn’t just seem possible, it seems probable. It would make up a critically important tier of Russia’s layered anti-satellite weapons ‘complex.’ And since Russia has already spent decades developing similar air-launched systems, that research can be leveraged to rapidly get such a capability into an operational form.
Assume that in the reasonable future any peer will have the ability for soft or hard kill of some portion of our satellite bandwidth access. Most people have a mature understanding of what happens to the utility of networks under attack or are shut down for EMCON reasons.
We have seen in the last half decade an increasing focus on our ability to fight w/o GPS or satellite access. We’ve started to act on this forgotten knowledge. This is good, and hopefully increasing year after year.
Like TLAM planning, for communication and weaponeering – always have a primary, backup, and a ready spare.
