Report: Russia Helping Iran to Develop a Supersonic Anti-Ship Missile
Russia is helping Iran develop a supersonic anti-ship cruise missile, according to a report in the Financial Times.
If the development comes to fruition, it could pose a threat to US Navy ships maintaining a blockade on Iranian ships and ports from a piquet line in the Gulf of Oman. So far, Iran has had no success in targeting US Navy vessels deployed against it, and this clear US advantage is proving to be decisive.
CENTCOM’s successful isolation of Iran from global maritime commerce is depriving Iran of much-needed export revenues, a financial stream which the IRGC needs to maintain internal order – both by paying the IRGC Basij internal security forces and keeping them loyal, but also by providing subsidies to shelter ordinary Iranians from fast-rising prices for basic essentials. Coordinated with US Treasury Secretary Bessent’s Operation Economic Outcast, the naval blockade looks to be the most effective tool the United States has to persuade Iranian leaders to return to the negotiating table in a more conciliatory mood, in the face of rising internal unrest which would otherwise threaten regime survival.
Iran’s current arsenal of anti-ship cruise missiles and drones is effective when deployed against innocent and undefended merchantmen, albeit not when they are being escorted by well-equipped warships. The Iranian missiles are consistently accurate, usually fired to disable engine rooms, but all are subsonic. The main systems in the Iranian long-range anti-ship cruise missile inventory are the Noor and Ghadir derivatives of the Chinese C-802 missile, which the Iranians have been tweaking and improving since reverse-engineering originals first supplied by China in 1995.
Subsonic sea-skimming anti-ship missiles such as the Noor and Ghadir can normally be detected at about 20nm range, so that the defending warship has about 150 seconds to engage an incoming target with a missile. If the incomer can evade the missile, then warships have Close-in Weapon Systems such as Phalanx to shoot down the target at short range. Intercept ranges and possibilities are better if warships can deploy helicopters with radar and intercept systems. But if the incomer were to be supersonic, the detection and engagement window comes down to about 40 seconds with a missile – and the target, the ramjet being smaller, is also a harder hit.
Cooperation between Iran and Russia over the development of ramjet motors, which are needed to power supersonic anti-ship missiles, has been going on since 2023 under the codename Project C430L, but the Farzanegan Propulsion Bureau has been working on ramjets since about 2017. The bulk of the Project C430L research and development work is taking place in Iran, and the Iranians are believed to have flight-tested their own ramjet design. Russian assistance, provided by the US-sanctioned rocket company NPO Mashinostroyenia through the state arms export company Rosoboronexport, has primarily been to comment on Iranian flight test telemetry, to identify where design improvements can be made.
The Russians do not appear to have handed over an example of a Kh-31, a Russian first-generation ramjet supersonic missile with a small warhead primarily used as an anti-radiation weapon. Iranians were apprehended trying to steal a Ukrainian Kh-31 back in 2018. Nor does it appear that they have shared details of the Kh-47 Kinzhal hypersonic missile, which the Russians are using to deadly effect against land and shipping targets in Ukraine, largely because it is so difficult to counter. While for reverse-engineering purposes, the Iranians are likely to have at least the Kh-31 technology, they do not appear to have operationalized any derivative of it or the Kh-47.
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The Financial Times story did not outline that a developmental milestone had been achieved, nor suggested that operational deployment of an Iranian supersonic or hypersonic anti-shipping missile is imminent. The story may instead have been prompted by an intelligence agency keen to make a political point and inhibit further cooperation, rather than to warn of the imminent or immediate threat to the Fifth Fleet in the Gulf of Oman. But the Iranians, on the balance of probability, may be further advanced in the development of a supersonic anti-ship cruise missile than Western intelligence agencies have been able to detect, and this could be the new weapon the Iranians are always boasting they are about to deploy.
In any case, the continuing Iranian efforts should give added impetus to the development of defensive systems which are urgently needed to counter both supersonic and hypersonic missiles – at sea and on land. In general, the development of hypersonic offensive missile systems is much further advanced in Russia, China and Iran but also in the West than the development of the defensive systems needed to counter them.
