Anti-Missile Defence Analysis: Part 1

With US President Trump due to begin talks with North Korea’s President Kim Jong-un over denuclearisation, Asian Military Review presents two perspectives on anti-tactical and anti-ballistic missile systems.

- Jon Lake

Defending the civilian population, national infrastructure, and specific fixed and mobile military targets (including deployed forces) against air and missile attack is becoming an increasingly complex, expensive and difficult task, and one that requires new and innovative solutions. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Asia. In the Far East the Republic of Korea and Japan are urgently building state of the art defences against the North Korean ballistic missile threat to augment the existing defensive systems that they have deployed to counter more conventional air threats.

Meanwhile, in the Middle East, the UAE is leading Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) efforts to build anti-missile defences in the Gulf region, while Saudi Arabia has experienced missile attacks from neighbouring Yemen’s Houthi insurgents. In all regions, the air and missile threat is a broad one, encompassing land-, sea and air-launched threats, manned and unmanned, simple and sophisticated, and following every possible variation in flight path and trajectory.

Conventional air defences have long been layered, with SHORAD (short range air defence) provided by point defence surface-to-air missiles and anti-aircraft artillery (AAA), and with manned fighters and longer ranged missiles taking care of threats further out from the target. But the development of higher speed bombers and attack aircraft, with sophicticated electronic warfare capabilities, often equipped with stand off weapons (including cruise missiles) and sometimes incorporating Low Observable (LO) technology has made it necessary to detect and engage targets at ever longer range, sometimes far beyond friendly borders.