Pentagon tests first land-based cruise missile after pulling out of INF Treaty

Oozlefinch said:

Wow, so many faults.

Once again, these are not anti-ship missiles. These are land attack missiles, even if conventional and not nuclear. These can not attack ships, they attack fixed land positions.

Secondly, "thousands"? OMG, not even close!

At most, the US had less than 200 of these even at the height of the Cold War. Now even though these were Air Force equipment, I will be using conventional Army nomenclature. Battalion instead of Squadron, Battery instead of Flight.

Now a GLCM Battalion was composed of 12 launchers, each launcher had 4 missiles. That means an entire Battalion of these is equipped with 48 missiles. At the height of their deployment during the Cold War, we only had 10 Battalions in operation. So for your hypothetical "Thousands", we would be talking about more than 4 times that number just on Guam alone.

Got an idea yet how absolutely insane that idea is?

So you want to put thousands of these things on Guam, in order to have a lot of missiles, that are unable to attack ships coming to attack the island.

No, this would not be the equivalent of "10 Burke Destroyers". Because many of those missiles will actually be the UGM-109B TASM missiles, which actually can attack ships. Using land attack missiles would be absolutely insane and pointless in attacking ships. Might as well try to shoot fish from 100 meters away with a shotgun.

And they can not fire "all at once". The Battalion could fire all 48 of their missiles, then they would be going down for a reload cycle. And unless they go insanely high in this capability, that means they are going to be down around 8 hours as they reload all of their missiles. It takes about 1-2 hours per launcher to complete a full reload of 4 missiles. So including time to go to and from the ammo depot to get more missiles, this 8 hours is actually more like 10+ hours. Then and only then can they fire another 48 missiles. And do you think the enemy is going to just be sitting back waiting to get pounded again?

As opposed to your fantasy, we would actually be much better off deploying a permanent solution, like basing something like AEGIS Ashore there rather than this insane fantasy. That system actually can in theory be equipped with any Standard Missile of the US Navy. Including the UGM-109B TASM Anti-Ship missile.

Please, oh please go and do some research about the Tomahawk series of missiles, their capabilities, and what they can do. And I do mean series. The GLCM, the ALCM, the SLCM, and the SSLCM. Each of these are very different, and are not even close to each other even though they are part of the same family. You can not just interchange them whenever you want.

In fact, far better would be to just acquire more of the AGM-84L air launched HARPOON missiles. This would be far cheaper than this insanity, and Guam already has a large air base.

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Base a few hundred in Guam as a standoff weapon that is always in the region not on a destroyer that was called away. Another few hundred in South Korea and another few hundred in Japan

Now you have a couple thousand cruise missiles + those in destroyers and subs without the billion dollar cost of the ship ( x 16)

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Lord Tammerlain said:

The US fired 802 tomahawk cruise missiles in the Iraq war in 2002. I expect against land based targets. Conventional cruise missiles based on land in East Asia would provide a significant force from which an attack could be made on an advanced opponent. Destruction of military assets along the coast of that country would increase the safe operating zone for US naval and air assets. It could potentially destroy the opponents mid range missiles which number at least 1500.


Note my original quote regarding numbers

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Oozlefinch said:

Not "suspect", they were all against land based targets. Bridges, C&C centers, supply depots, unit assembly points, and the like.

Not against mobile targets. Like ships, units on the move, and targets like that. You keep missing this simple little fact. For use on Guam, they would be absolutely worthless, because they would be trying to attack targets that move.

And as I keep saying, the exact same thing can be accomplished my launching systems that we already have, which are mobile. Specifically ships and aircraft. That are nowhere near as vulnerable to attack as units based on the ground.

And in case you did not know, the distance of Guam to China is over double the flight range of a Tomahawk Missile. So once again, any placed in Guam would end up simply splashing into the ocean in the middle of nowhere.

There is a reason why we divested ourselves of out long range ground based strategic forces like this. Outside of a war in Europe, they simply made no sense. They rely upon being within a close range of the enemy, and were simply more easily satisfied with other launching systems. This entire system did not exist a full decade, it was only made to counter a single Soviet system, which is also gone.

You seem absolutely determined to try and bring back some of the worst of the Cold War weapons, for absolutely no reason.

When it comes to trying to develop and field new weapon systems, only one thing has to be taken into consideration. "What can this do that no other system can accomplish".

Well, the purpose of this is to launch cruise missiles. Can that be accomplished in other ways? Yes, it can. There are many other systems that can launch cruise missiles, so why add another one that gives no real benefit?

Rather than launching from Guam, we can simply base 10 B-52s there. That would give the power of 5 Battalions of GLCM launchers, and give a hell of a lot of other benefits. Launched from higher altitude, they then have a longer range. They can also be launched from closer to their actual target. And finally, the reload times would be greatly reduced. Going from 8-10 hours to reload a Battalion worth of missiles to 2-4 hours.

So what benefit does the GLCM offer over an ALCM? Actually, none. And when compared, the GLCM is actually inferior.

You keep bringing up China over and over again. Great, you are obsessed with them, I get it. But you keep missing that this would be of minimal use at best against China. We do not share a border with China. None of our allies share a border with China. As a way to get ordinance on target in a conventional sense, these are actually a rather poor way to do it, especially when compared to other systems we already have in place that can do a better job, cheaper and more effectively.

But I am done going over these basic points over and over again, each time giving quite a lot of specifics about the various types of Tomahawk missiles, their capabilities, and alternatives. I always chuckle when I find myself in these situations, where I am trying to talk a Hawk off of a cliff, and they will not even listen at all, completely entrenched into some kind of Deep Cold War type of thinking without even wondering about what is actually being discussed.

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Against this background, analysts have made three arguments in favor of withdrawing from the INF Treaty and deploying GBIRs:

-U.S. GBIRs will better deter China.
-GBIRs are far cheaper than U.S. air and sea platforms.
-Land-based missiles are more survivable than U.S. air- and sea-based assets.
Each of these arguments has some merit. However, their proponents ignore the very real political challenges associated with deploying U.S. GBIRs in the Asia Pacific region. They also ignore specific military challenges, including the potential for a missile race and long-term regional and strategic instability. Further, proponents of U.S. GBIRs have not rationalized the likely budgetary trade-offs required to develop these new missiles given the political fight brewing over defense budgeting in 2019, and whether new GBIRs are more cost effective than utilizing existing or planned military capabilities.

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