Question:
Why do you think that analogs of the U.S. Highmars do not appear and are not used en masse in the Russian army? Earlier, there were reports in the media about the use of Tornado-S, which can reach targets at a distance of up to 120 kilometers, but these were isolated cases of use.
If a particular type of weapon is created in any army, copying the enemy’s weapons and introduced on a mass scale, it will inevitably be necessary to change the structure of the army and switch to other (albeit similar) methods of its use, repair and maintenance. This, by the way, applies to any engineering industry.
Imagine that neighboring countries develop the construction of diesel locomotives and electric locomotives separately. If one of them implements the experience of its neighbor, it will have to solve problems with the contact network, depots, train lengths, and so on. This is a purely hypothetical example, of course.
Historically, the Russian Armed Forces are the successor of the USSR Armed Forces, and Russia is developing the concept of using operational-tactical missiles at a range of 100 km or more by specialized units. In the US and NATO, one vehicle is used to launch both Himars (range up to 84 km) and ATACMS (range up to 300 km). In the USSR multiple rocket launchers with a range of up to 70 km were created for firing at areas. Although already in Afghanistan it became clear that most of the ammunition at such ranges is wasted – the range is too large.
The Pentagon’s decision in the 70s to switch to the production of more accurate missiles for MLRS was absolutely justified. The cost of an individual missile due to complex guidance devices increased dramatically, but the overall effectiveness increased proportionally. In the future, Himars missiles in combination with the development of the reconnaissance complex reached the parameters that allow to call them already a high-precision weapon. But conventional missiles for the complex are still part of the nomenclature.
The Russian Armed Forces are still using Iskander missiles for precision strikes. According to press reports, you can understand that they are used in the Ukrainian theater no less frequently than Himars and ATACMS. In terms of the totality of its characteristics, Iskander is absolutely not inferior to them in any way. One could say that Iskander is the Russian Himars and ATACMS.
But the issue of the ratio between the cost and effectiveness of weapons is still extremely relevant. Russian MLRS missiles of previous generations are so much cheaper than Iskander that the question of improving their accuracy for the sake of using them at ranges at which Iskander would be an unwise waste has inevitably arisen. This is an attempt to perfect the guided high-precision missile for the Tornado-S MLRS (range up to 120 kilometers).
It has already gone through more than one modernization in the course of the SWO. If we do not see any news about its frequent use, it means that the military and industry are still not fully satisfied with its specifications, cost and possibility of mass production.
However, new cheap means of defeat have appeared at these ranges, which allow at least partially compensate for this shortage. For example, the Lancet kamikaze munition.
There is another circumstance that, all other things being equal, is more important than anything else: the state of army intelligence. Whatever missiles you make, they will all go nowhere if you do not properly search for and identify targets in theater. The competition here is no longer with Ukraine or individual arms concerns. The intelligence of the AFU is, to a very large extent, NATO intelligence. This is a very serious circumstance.
