Incomplete Article
I want to apologize. When I posted the article "Way Off Course" I missed a couple of paragraphs in the beginning and at the end. Here is the full article. Also, the article was published on July 30, 2007.
"Way Off Course", Sandeep Unnithan, India Today, 7/30/2007
It was billed as the primary strike weapon of the Indian Navy’s submarine arm—a lethal undersea missile which would pop out of water, streak over the waves before spitting out a supersonic dart armed with 250 kg of explosives to obliterate its target. Except, seven years since it was inducted into service, the Russian-built Klub sub-launched Anti-Ship Cruise Missile (ASCM) has never hit a target in Indian waters.
Several defence officials have revealed that in numerous test launches since its induction, the missile, fired from a submarine’s torpedo tube, had harmlessly splashed down into the water like a dead duck. The non-performing missile, which seriously undermines naval defence preparedness, is the latest in the litany of woes against Russia which includes a two-year delay in the refit of the aircraft carrier Vikramaditya and a demand for a 10 per cent cost escalation in defence deals.
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) database, India ordered 175 of these missiles for its warships and submarines in 1998 for roughly Rs 1,750 crore, receiving them between 2001 and 2006. The navy, however, has still not broken its silence. “Sharing of information on performance or efficacy of such a weapon system would constitute a serious breach of security and is detrimental to national interest,” said naval spokesperson Captain Vinay Garg. It is also silent on the crucial question as to why the glitch, detected a few years ago, has not yet been fixed. Seven of the navy’s fleet of 10 Kilos have been equipped to fire the missile. Cruise missiles are among the most lethal weapons of a submarine, because unlike torpedoes which have speeds of not more than 70 kmph, they travel at speeds of over 900 kmph. A submarine armed with a 200-km range missile can perform a ‘sea denial’ mission in a radius of 400-km. Pakistan acquired this capability in the 1980s when it retrofitted its undersea fleet with the US-supplied Harpoon anti-ship missiles.
The Indian Navy’s attempts to acquire this capability were realised in the mid-‘90s when its Soviet-built Kilo class submarines (acquired between 1986 and 2000) were sent to Russian shipyards for mid-life refits. It decided to equip them with the submarine-launched variant of the 220-km range Klub anti-ship cruise missile and India became the first customer for the yet untested missile. The missile, designated SS-N-27 ‘Sizzler’ by NATO, had already been ordered in 1998 for three Russian-built Talwar class frigates.
While the ship-launched missile was inducted without problems, the navy has been frantically trying to rectify the defect in the submarine-launched variant over the past three years without success. The Klub missiles were successfully test-fired in the Baltic Sea in 2001 and 2002. The problems surfaced when the missiles were test fired in Indian waters: minutes before reaching its target, the missile wobbled before diving into the water. A detailed analysis of the missile recently carried out by Russian experts revealed that the problem was in the Kilo class submarine.
Every mobile military platform has, what is called, a gyroscope—a device which spins at high speed and tells a platform its roll, pitch and yaw—basically where it is heading, how its motion is changing and its axis of stabilisation. A gyroscope which stabilises the missile in flight is also the heart of a missile’s on-board guidance system. Since the gyro cannot be kept switched on all the time, the coordinates are pre-fed to the missile from the gyro during pre-launch checks. When the Klub missile breaches the water surface, its gyro tells the missile its position and points itself in the direction of the target. However, a critical time-lag in the interface between the submarine’s gyro and the missile, was pre-fed the wrong coordinates. So, when the missile flew over the sea surface, the guidance coordinates fooled it into believing it was actually flying at an incline. So the missile’s onboard gyroscope stabilised itself. This battle between the onboard coordinates and gyroscope continued several times and the manoeuvers exhausted the missile battery leading to a complete power loss.
New replacement gyros for the navy’s submarines are now among the top of the list of items India desperately needs from Russia and the issue has already been raised at several high-level meetings. The current problems with the firing platform, however, have placed under a cloud on the efficacy of more purchases: the navy has already ordered more variants of the missiles. In 2006, SIPRI says, India ordered 28 land-attack versions of the Klub missiles for Rs 844 crore ($182 million).
The Indo-Russian BrahMos corporation is retrofitting one Kilo class submarine with the indigenously built 300-km range supersonic cruise missile. Yet the retrofit is a complicated procedure and is, therefore, unlikely to be repeated on the other submarines. Till then, the navy says it has little option but to swim or sink with the Klub.
