The U.S. Army test-fires an ATACMS in 2022.
U.S. Army photo
Russian air-defenses aren’t always effective, but they’re effective enough that Ukrainian warplanes and helicopters supporting ground troops along the front line either must lob rockets and bombs from miles away—or, to avoid detection, fly so low that they practically scrape the treetops.
The danger to aircrews would be greater if the Ukrainians weren’t relentlessly hunting the Russians’ air-defense batteries. And that hunt just got a big boost, in the form of American-made M39 rockets, otherwise known as Army Tactical Missile Systems, or ATACMS.
The Ukrainian army recently got its first 1990s-vintage M39s, and promptly fired three of them at a Russian helicopter base in Berdyansk, in occupied southern Ukraine. The dramatic nighttime strike scattered thousands of grenade-size submunitions across the airfield’s aprons and reportedly destroyed at least nine helicopters.
Now imagine those same steel-and-tungsten bomblets raining down on an air-defense battery with its fragile radars, support vans, launchers and missiles. “ATACMS is a combat multiplier in the deep battlespace because it can neutralize or suppress a large array of target types to include: air defense and surface-to-surface radars or missiles,” U.S. Army major Carter Rogers wrote in a 1991 thesis for the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College.
The M39 is a two-ton, 13-foot ballistic missile with a solid rocket motor and a warhead containing 950 submunitions. Fired by a tracked or wheeled launcher, the missile ranges as far as 100 miles under inertial guidance.
That the U.S. Army always meant for the M39 to suppress enemy air-defenses is obvious in its design. A rocket meant for, say, bunker-busting would have a single large warhead rather than a casing full of bomblets.
Indeed, the very first time the U.S. Army fired an M39 in combat, in Operation Desert Storm in 1991, the target was an Iraqi S-75 air-defense battery that threatened coalition warplanes. The ATACMS strike “successfully neutralized the target,” Rogers wrote. “Though its doctrine was relatively new and untested, the system proved accurate and lethal with unprecedented results.”
Ukrainian forces at present use a wide array of munitions for the suppression-of-enemy-air-defenses mission, or SEAD. They include 40-mile M30/31 rockets fired by the same tracked M270 and wheeled High-Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems launchers that fire the 100-mile range M39.
They also include explosives-laden first-person-view drones and Sukhoi Su-27 and Mikoyan MiG-29 fighters launching American-made AGM-88 radar-homing missiles. And for the deepest SEAD strikes, such as those targeting long-range S-400 batteries in Crimea, the Ukrainians have fired modified Neptune anti-ship missiles.
Operationally, the M39 as a SEAD weapon fits between the small drones and the anti-ship missiles. Think of a drone strike as shallow, opportunistic and minimally damaging, where a Neptune strike is deep, carefully planned and very damaging.
M39s fired from a hundred miles away could hold at risk a portion of the Russian air-defense network that’s deep behind the front line, but not so far from the front line that it requires a strategic-level special operation to suppress it.
In that sense, the M39 might overlap with the air-launched AGM-88. The difference, of course, is that SEAD with an ATACMS missile is safer for the shooter than an aerial SEAD sortie is. The Russians have shot down dozens of the Ukrainian air force’s 80 or so pre-war Su-27s and MiG-29s, but haven’t destroyed a single one of the army’s 60 or so M270s and HIMARS.
“Executing joint SEAD with ATACMS in support of a deep operation gives aviators security and flexibility,” Rogers explained.