Il giallo del Tomahawk caduto in mano ai russi.

Giuseppe Sandro Mela.

2018-04-29.

Questo è un argomento che solo tra molti decenni si potrà sapere se fosse stato o meno vero.

I russi affermano di aver potuto raccogliere un missile Tomahawk inesploso e di starlo utilizzando per comprenderne il funzionamento e migliorare quindi i propri sistemi di arma.

I russi affermano e gli americani smentiscono: nessuno è al momento in grado di appurare cosa ci sia di vero.

«Russia has gotten its hands on a U.S. Tomahawk cruise missile and it’s going to study it to improve its own weapon systems»

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«the U.S. Department of Defense told CNBC that the claims from Moscow are “absurd.”»

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«an unexploded Tomahawk cruise missile and one high accuracy air-launched missile that the U.S. and its allies used in their last airstrike in Syria on April 14 has been brought to Moscow»

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«Some of the missiles failed to reach the designated targets apparently due to technical failures, which created the risk of destroying civilian facilities and causing civilian casualties»

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«Two of them, a cruise missile Tomahawk and a high-accuracy air-launched missile, have been brought to Moscow»

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«The results of this work will be used to improve Russian weapon systems»

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Riportiamo la notizia per completezza informativa.

Nota. Da quel che si possono conoscere i servizi segreti delle grandi potenze, nessuno si stupirebbe se progettisti ed operai addetti alla costruzione dei missili da crociera Tomahawk fossero tutte spie russe.

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→ Cnbc. 2018-04-25. Russia claims it has a US Tomahawk cruise missile and will use it to improve its own weapons

– Russia has gotten its hands on a U.S. Tomahawk cruise missile and it’s going to study it to improve its own weapon systems, the Defense Ministry said Wednesday.

– However, the U.S. Department of Defense told CNBC that the claims from Moscow are “absurd.”

– Russia said it would study the Tomahawk and would use it to improve Russian weapon systems.

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Russia has gotten its hands on a U.S. Tomahawk cruise missile and it’s going to study it to improve its own weapon systems, the Defense Ministry said Wednesday,

However, the U.S. Department of Defense told CNBC that the claims from Moscow are “absurd.”

An official within Russia’s ministry said that an unexploded Tomahawk cruise missile and one high accuracy air-launched missile that the U.S. and its allies used in their last airstrike in Syria on April 14 has been brought to Moscow, Russian news agency TASS reported.

The chief of the Russian General Staff’s main operations directorate, Colonel-General Sergey Rudskoy, told a news briefing on Wednesday that Russian military specialists were already studying the missiles.

“Some of the missiles failed to reach the designated targets apparently due to technical failures, which created the risk of destroying civilian facilities and causing civilian casualties,” Rudskoy said.

“Two of them, a cruise missile Tomahawk and a high-accuracy air-launched missile, have been brought to Moscow,” he said, adding that Russian specialists were studying them.

“The results of this work will be used to improve Russian weapon systems.”

A Pentagon spokesman for the U.S. Department of Defense rubbished the claims, telling CNBC that they were an attempt to distract people from its alliance with Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime.

“This is another example of the Russian disinformation campaign to distract attention from their moral complicity to the Assad Regime’s atrocities and the civilian carnage in western Syria,” Eric Pahon, Pentagon spokesman, told CNBC via email on Wednesday.

“The claims … regarding our target selection are absurd, as is the rest of the (TASS) article. On the Tomahawk, we have seen no proof, other than statements made to Russian state-owned media, that their claims are true. This is likely another smoke screen of propaganda to distract from the real issue at hand — the murder of innocent civilians by a murderous regime propped up by Russian backing,” he said.

Tomahawks

Tomahawk missiles are, their maker Raytheon says, “modern, mature, powerful” and can “can circle for hours, shift course instantly on command and beam a picture of its target to controllers halfway around the world before striking with pinpoint accuracy.”

Raytheon notes that Tomahawks can be launched from a ship or submarine and can fly into heavily defended airspace more than 1,000 miles away “to conduct precise strikes on high-value targets with minimal collateral damage. Launching the weapon from such a long distance helps to keep sailors out of harm’s way.”

It notes that the U.S. and allied militaries have used Tomahawk missiles more than 2,000 times in combat, and flight-tested them 500 times. In April 2017, U.S. Navy destroyers launched 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles at targets on a Syrian air base, it said.

A U.S. Department of Defense press briefing on April 14 — the date the U.S. and its allies launched an airstrike on Syrian government bases in retaliation for a suspected chemical weapons attack carried out by the Syrian regime, an ally of Russia – confirmed the use of multiple Tomahawk missiles in the airstrikes.

Pentagon Chief Spokesperson Dana White and Joint Staff Director Lt. Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr. said Tomahawk missiles had been deployed to various targets in Syria including the Barzeh Research and Development Center (believed to be involved in chemical weapon research and development) and a chemical weapons storage facility.

What Russia will learn from the Tomahawk missile is uncertain given that it has recently boasted of developing state-of-the-art missiles itself. Only in March, Russian President Vladimir Putin unveiled what he called a state-of-the-art slew of new defense systems. This included a new prototype missile that “can reach any point in the world” and a supersonic weapon that cannot be tracked by anti-missile systems.

USS Carl Vinson e North Korea. Ecco perché la flotta è scappata. – Bloomberg

Giuseppe Sandro Mela.

2017-05-03.

Se la notizia non la avesse data l’Agenzia Bloomberg la avremmo ritenuta essere una barzelletta.

Abbiamo aspettato qualche giorno a pubblicarla, in attesa di una smentita, che non è arrivata.

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«The U.S. Navy flotilla sailing toward the Korean peninsula to deter Kim Jong Un’s regime lacks a key capability: It can’t shoot down ballistic missiles»

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«The USS Carl Vinson and the aircraft carrier’s accompanying destroyers and cruiser are expected to arrive in waters near the peninsula this week, carrying a full complement of weaponry, including scores of Tomahawk cruise and anti-ship missiles, radar-jamming aircraft and non-stealthy “Super Hornet” jets built by Boeing Co.»

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«That firepower brings a lot to any fight, but the Navy’s lack of ballistic missile defense capability …. force has a significant gap as it warns North Korea against another missile test and pressures it to back down from its nuclear program»

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«They aren’t equipped with the version of the Aegis surveillance system made by Lockheed Martin Corp. that can track long-range ballistic missiles or Raytheon Co.’s SM-3 interceptors that are capable of bringing down medium and longer-range ballistic missiles.»

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«And the three South Korean “Sejong the Great”-class destroyers currently in operation don’t have ballistic missile defense capability»

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Non si intende minimamente entrare nel merito del problema.

Si sa per esperienza che quando si parla di operazioni militari una gran massa delle notizie sono mera disinformazione.

Però, l’articolo di Bloomberg lascia alquanto perplessi.

Al momento attuale i sistemi di arma sono così numerosi da imporre altrettanto numerosi sistemi di contro azione. Gli americani hanno ottimi sistemi di arma contro i missili balistici, e non è assolutamente detto che essi debbano essere montati direttamente sulla portaerei e non piuttosto sulle navi di appoggio e di scorta.

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Voci, e quindi pettegolezzi non verificati ed inverificabili, hanno anche suggerito che la North Korea sia stata dotata di sistemi missilistici 3M22 Zircon russi o sistemi equivalenti cinesi. La notizia sembrerebbe essere destituita di fondamento, essendo ufficialmente tale sistema ancora in fase di test ed essendo del tutto inverosimile che la Russia conceda i suoi più avanzati sistemi a paesi terzi, per di più non in stretti rapporti diplomatici.

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→ Bloomberg. 2017-04-26. Trump ‘Armada’ Sent to Deter Kim Can’t Shoot Down His Missiles

– Vinson strike group escorts aren’t equipped for interceptions

– Navy vessels homeported in Japan would be needed for that

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The U.S. Navy flotilla sailing toward the Korean peninsula to deter Kim Jong Un’s regime lacks a key capability: It can’t shoot down ballistic missiles.

The USS Carl Vinson and the aircraft carrier’s accompanying destroyers and cruiser are expected to arrive in waters near the peninsula this week, carrying a full complement of weaponry, including scores of Tomahawk cruise and anti-ship missiles, radar-jamming aircraft and non-stealthy “Super Hornet” jets built by Boeing Co.

That firepower brings a lot to any fight, but the Navy’s lack of ballistic missile defense capability on the scene means the Trump administration’s high-profile show of force has a significant gap as it warns North Korea against another missile test and pressures it to back down from its nuclear program.

“One carrier by itself is not a game changer,” Omar Lamrani, a senior military analyst at Stratfor, a company that does geopolitical analysis, said in an interview. Although the Vinson-led group is getting a lot of attention, it’s “not going to do terribly much by itself,” he said.

Tensions on the peninsula have ratcheted up as President Donald Trump and Kim face off over North Korea’s continuing development of its nuclear and intercontinental ballistic missile program. Trump vowed in January that he wouldn’t let North Korea develop a nuclear weapon capable of reaching the U.S., and he said this month that the U.S. was sending an “armada” to the region. North Korea, in turn, called the Vinson’s deployment “intimidation and blackmail” and promised it would “react to a total war with an all-out war.”

This week the regime in Pyongyang conducted a live-fire artillery exercise east of the capital, while the USS Michigan, a nuclear-powered submarine capable of carrying 154 Tomahawks, arrived at the South Korean port of Busan. In a highly unusual move, the Navy publicly announced the visit. But North Korea, which marked the 85th anniversary of its army during the week, didn’t conduct another nuclear test.

Accompanying the Vinson, which is en route from the Philippine Sea south of Japan, are the destroyers USS Wayne E. Meyer and USS Michael Murphy and the Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruiser USS Lake Champlain. They aren’t equipped with the version of the Aegis surveillance system made by Lockheed Martin Corp. that can track long-range ballistic missiles or Raytheon Co.’s SM-3 interceptors that are capable of bringing down medium and longer-range ballistic missiles.

Nor are the modern Japanese Navy destroyers JS Samidare and JS Ashigara that joined the Vinson group for exercises equipped for missile defense detection or intercepts, a Japanese Navy spokesman confirmed. And the three South Korean “Sejong the Great”-class destroyers currently in operation don’t have ballistic missile defense capability, Tom Callender, a naval forces analyst with the Washington-based Heritage Foundation, said in an interview.

Risk to Seoul

While the Obama administration began the process of deploying Thaad, a high-altitude missile defense system, to the South Korean mainland, the hardware isn’t fully operational yet either. That leaves Seoul — just 35 miles (56 kilometers) south of the demilitarized zone — and the rest of the country more vulnerable to attack.

Asked about the Vinson carrier group, Navy Commander Gary Ross, a Pentagon spokesman, said via email that “we don’t discuss specific capabilities of weapons systems.” He added that “no single capability defends against all threats. Rather it is the employment of integrated, multi-layered land and sea-based systems that provide missile defense” for the U.S. and allies.

If the Trump administration wants to buttress its threats — at the risk of escalating the crisis — it could deploy toward Korea some or all of the six Navy vessels capable of defending against ballistic missiles that are now based at Yokosuka, on the eastern side of Japan. Just moving those ships toward the Korean peninsula would signal to the world U.S. action to stop a missile test is more imminent and would be seen as an urgent threat by Pyongyang.

Navy Admiral Harry Harris, the head of U.S. forces in Korea and the Pacific, cited those ships’ capabilities Wednesday in response to questions about whether the Vinson is capable of deterring ballistic missile launches.

“We have ballistic missile ships in the Sea of Japan, in the East Sea, that are capable of defending against ballistic missile attacks,” Harris told the House Armed Services Committee. He added that the carrier group is well-equipped to defend itself against attack with its own escort warships, saying, “If it flies, it will die, if it’s flying against the Carl Vinson strike group.”

The six vessels in Japan are the cruiser USS Shiloh and the destroyers USS Stethem, Barry, Benfold, Curtis Wilbur and John S. McCain. A seventh, the Fitzgerald, is currently at sea conducting a maritime exercise in waters west of Japan, the Navy said in a statement.

Sea of Japan

Those U.S. ships “would be in a good position to engage medium-range ballistic missiles going into the Sea of Japan, which is where the previous North Korean test shots have gone,” said Bryan Clark, a naval analyst with the Washington-based Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, who previously served as a special assistant to the Chief of Naval Operations.

That presence off of Japan means that “when the Vinson gets there, it will not need to bring additional BMD capability,” Clark added, referring to ballistic missile defense.

The cruisers and destroyers “bring a significant capability to the region,” Lieutenant Commander William Knight, spokesman for the Navy Pacific Fleet, said in an email.

Yet even if Aegis-equipped vessels are stationed near Korea and Japan, in the case of a North Korean ICBM test they wouldn’t be able to shoot it down immediately after launch, said David Wright, a missile defense analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists.

“There is a misconception that if it was close enough,” a U.S. Navy BMD vessel “could shoot a missile down during boost phase,” Wright said. “But it doesn’t have that capability. During boost phase the missile is an accelerating target, and Aegis doesn’t have the maneuverability to home in on such a target.”

Boost Phase

“Similarly, it would not be able to shoot down shorter-range missiles, like the Musudan, during boost phase,” he said. “You might be able to shoot it down after boost phase, but by that time North Korea would be able to get information about the most critical part of the trajectory, so that strategy is unlikely to slow” the regime’s missile development process, he said.

The Carl Vinson and its four strike squadrons of aircraft plus escort vessels with more than 300 Tomahawk and air-defense missiles “provide an impressive non-nuclear strategic deterrent,” the Heritage Foundation’s Callender said. The Vinson’s aircraft include the latest Super Hornets and Growler electronic jamming aircraft.

Tomahawks are highly capable of striking surface targets such as air defense systems, but they aren’t designed for missile defense or penetrating deeply buried facilities, bunkers or caves. The current “Tactical Tomahawk” version is capable of loitering over an area and being re-directed against new targets, such as wheeled or tracked missile launchers and mobile artillery.

Stealthy Bombers

If the U.S. were to conduct a preemptive strike on North Korea, the Vinson’s role would be to enable missions by stealthy B-2 bombers and F-22 fighters, Clark said.

The Vinson fleet would need to use its radar-jamming capabilities and Tomahawks to degrade North Korea’s existing air defense system “before conducting strikes against North Korean nuclear or missile facilities,” Clark said.

Strafor recently completed an assessment of North Korea’s nuclear challenge and plausible U.S. responses that concluded the regime has more than 1,000 missiles of various ranges and destructive power that could strike from across North Korea.

But their military utility is limited by the relatively small number of launchers, which would have to be reloaded for successive launches and vulnerable to U.S. and South Korean strikes.