The sinking of the Russian Navy’s Slava-class cruiser, Moskva, offers critical insights into antiship missile (ASM) tactics, revealing valuable lessons that challenge conventional wisdom on missile design, warhead size, and naval strategy. This incident underscores the need to rethink modern naval armament, with a renewed focus on the impact of smaller, well-placed missiles on large warships.
Understanding the Moskva Sinking Incident
Two Ukrainian Neptune antiship cruise missiles (ASCMs), each carrying a 330-pound warhead, reportedly struck Moskva in 2022. These ASCMs sparked fires that ravaged the forward superstructure, ultimately leading to an explosion, possibly from the ship’s own stored weapons.
Despite her substantial size and extensive armour, Moskova sank while being towed for repairs. This incident raises pertinent questions about the design and effectiveness of antiship missiles, challenging traditional assumptions about warhead size and ship resilience.
Moskva Sinking: Rethinking Antiship Missile Warheads
One lesson from the Moskva incident is that warhead size is not always key to disabling a large vessel. Traditionally, experts believed explosive force should match the ship’s tonnage to cause serious damage.
However, Moskva sank after only two missile hits, defying these assumptions. For a ship of Moskva’s size, the rule of thumb predicted the need for at least five Neptune missiles. This event shows modern warships are more vulnerable to smaller warheads than once thought.
Ships carry fuel, munitions, and explosive materials, increasing the risk from smaller missile strikes. The idea that antiship missiles must have enormous warheads now seems questionable. Smaller warheads can cause devastation through secondary effects like fires from unburned missile fuel.
In Moskva’s case, Neptune’s smaller warheads triggered fires that spread through critical areas. These fires, fuelled by stored ammunition, caused irreparable damage and ultimately sank the ship.
The Sheffield Parallel: Smaller Warheads, Bigger Impacts
The Moskva incident isn’t the first instance where a smaller warhead had an outsized effect on a large ship. The British destroyer HMS Sheffield experienced a similar fate during the Falklands War in 1982, when it was struck by an Exocet missile with a small warhead. Fire from residual fuel compounded the damage in both cases, escalating beyond the initial blast effects.
Fuelled by ignited diesel tanks, the Sheffield’s fire forced the crew to abandon the ship due to overwhelming smoke and flames. Moskva encountered similar secondary damage, reinforcing the notion that fire and explosion risk from fuel and stored weapons must be factored into ASM design.
Moskva Sinking: Balancing Warhead Weight with Range
The Moskva and Sheffield incidents also underline the importance of evaluating the balance between warhead weight and fuel capacity. Larger warheads limit a missile’s range, which can be detrimental in modern naval warfare, where longer-range strikes often determine tactical advantage. For many ships, the tradeoff between weapon weight and fuel may favour extending a missile’s range over carrying a bigger payload.
Modern navies often prioritise ASMs with extended ranges to outmanoeuvre opponents and gain first-strike capabilities. Smaller warheads with precise targeting capabilities offer significant tactical advantages, particularly in scenarios involving missile swarms or fast-attack craft.
By focusing on longer-range ASMs with smaller warheads, navies can enhance their missile loadout and increase their ability to counter diverse threats, as illustrated in Captain Wayne P. Hughes Jr’s Fleet Tactics and Coastal Combat.
Precision Targeting in Antiship Missiles
The idea of a more precise, smaller warhead brings up another essential point—accuracy in ASM targeting. If modern ASMs are equipped with advanced sensors and artificial intelligence, they could potentially identify vulnerable ship sections, such as magazines or the Combat Information Centre (CIC).
With accurate targeting, smaller warheads could achieve lethal results, particularly in triggering secondary explosions from fuel or munitions. A missile capable of discerning and targeting such critical points could disable a warship with minimal explosive power.
This precision targeting could drastically alter naval engagement tactics, allowing ships to carry more missiles at lower cost while retaining, or even enhancing, their destructive capability. The ability to deploy more missiles is particularly valuable when countering swarm tactics or overwhelming a ship’s defences in large-scale conflicts.
Implications for Future Antiship Missile Design
The sinking of Moskva raises the question: are large warheads necessary for antiship missiles in today’s naval warfare? The incidents involving Moskva and Sheffield suggest that an effective ASM design should prioritise range, precision, and the likelihood of triggering secondary damage over raw explosive power.
By focusing on fuel-efficient designs and sophisticated targeting systems, navies could deploy ASMs with enhanced versatility, able to strike at greater distances and more precisely incapacitate their targets.
In a hypothetical scenario, a cruiser with compact, long-range ASMs could strike enemy ships before facing return fire. This advantage supports Captain Hughes’s “strike-first” doctrine in naval warfare. The doctrine stresses that delivering the first blow often decides the outcome of an engagement.
Moskva Sinking: Navigating the Future of Naval Defence
The Moskva incident has spurred interest in antiship missile capabilities and strategic approaches in naval warfare. Modern naval ships, packed with flammable materials and powerful munitions, face a heightened risk from even modest ASM warheads.
With the rise of advanced missile guidance technologies, precision strikes using smaller warheads have the potential to redefine engagement tactics, placing greater emphasis on range and targeting accuracy.
From a design standpoint, Moscow’s lesson should encourage military planners to consider ASMs that prioritise ranges and missile counts. Instead of fewer heavy-hitting missiles, ships equipped with long-range, precision-guided ASMs could deploy a more extensive missile arsenal, allowing for more versatile and effective response options.
This approach would be especially advantageous for countering adversaries who employ swarm tactics or field multiple fast-attack craft.
Conclusion: Rethinking Antiship Missile Strategy
The Moskva sinking shows how naval combat is evolving and highlights the value of long-range, smaller-warhead ASMs in future wars. Shifting focus from warhead size to fuel capacity, range, and precision targeting can improve ASM design for modern naval battles.
Moskva and Sheffield prove smaller warheads can be as deadly as larger ones with advanced targeting systems. Such weapons are especially lethal against ships carrying fuel, munitions, or other volatile materials.
References
- Hughes, Wayne P., Jr. Fleet Tactics and Coastal Combat. Naval Institute Press, 2000.
- Hooton, E.R. War Over the Falklands. Pen & Sword Military, 2020.
- National Interest. “What the Sinking of the Moskva Means for Naval Warfare.” April 2022.
- BBC News. “Ukraine Claims Missile Strike Sank Russia’s Moskva Warship.” April 2022.
