South Korea is looking for a JASSM like cruise missile. If the JASSM worked as advertised this might be a good idea. Well it might be a good idea regardless.
The JASSM blew out on costs big time in the U.S. It still has to prove some fusing issues and is on a watch list to keep reliability acceptable for the USAF in anything other than highly scripted range events.
Yet even if the probability of kill is lower than needed and you end up with more than the expected number of duds it might not be so bad. Why?
Most of the targets South Korea would want to hit are kind of close. Spend a billion or more on “JASSM-level” missiles (whatever that means) might be a better idea than spending tens of billions on over-priced and over-hyped Just So Flawed fighters or some other option.
Yeah, that might work.
1 comment:
Why?
North Korea has more TBMs than a mole colony and except for the Southwest which is merely 'hilly' the entire place is severely elevated and hard granite rock.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:North_Korea_Topography.png
Unless you have a Mach 10 reentry vehicle behind one of those land-shark SCT driller warheads (I hear DARPA mumbling about as an alternative to nukes), nothing a cruise weapon does is going to do more than smear composite on a cliffside and maybe kill a few deer.
So, being a paranoid type, I figure one of three things:
1. KORUS being dead, ROK decided to check out their pride of place status level by asking Uncle for a very special gift. If they don't get it, they will turn to France and Naval SCALP (nice thing about ships is that they can't be commando raided, 400km out to sea).
2. Both Koreas are now/always were stalking horses for China who wants the latest, greatest, cheap LO or perhaps smart targeting sensor. JASSM being the missile that takes pictures and sends them back to us gets them into our TTNT networking as well.
3. ROK is trying to stand up their own precision nuclear force because they no longer trust us to umbrella them and want a cheap means to get a survivable delivery vehicle which is a warhead-class above the AGM-84H they now use off the F-15K (AGM-158 supposedly has a Lancaster like, configurable, warhead bay which tells you what we're thinking about in terms of ejectables and HPM...).
Post a Comment