@Ak01 I have two more questions and correct me if i am wrong.
Question 1: From what you've explained so far, I understand that high altitude is essential for maintaining a missile's high speed and preventing a significant loss in range. However, if the missile is a subsonic cruise missile—like Pakistan's Taimoor or the SCALP/Storm Shadow—would it still be necessary for the launching aircraft to climb to high altitude before release? Even if the range is slightly reduced at lower altitudes, these missiles don't require high speed since they cruise subsonically. Wouldn't launching them low help keep the aircraft safer from enemy air defenses? For example, India's supersonic BrahMos forces the carrier aircraft (like the Su-30MKI) to expose itself more to Pakistani air defenses, whereas their subsonic SCALP-EG is harder to detect and intercept partly because it can be launched from lower altitudes. Am I understanding this correctly?
@JamD had a write up somewhere on this but, Turbojets are wildly inefficient at low altitudes. Our cruise missiles likely rely on turbojet engines, not great ones either. Ill leave this question to him to answer because my knowledge on this is not as in depth as his.
On the second half of the question, we can launch them wherever- hence why we can do surface launches, but they wont stay that low, particularly to extend their reach to their max ranges. You will find them struggling with their efficiency due to a mix of factors, drag, thermals, engine performance, but theres also another reason why we may not be able to have super low flying cruise missiles- and thats the guidance stack (something which Taimoor IR could fix)- but again, this is a question for
@JamD
Question 2: Is it feasible to develop a small, short-range interceptor similar to a MANPADS but designed specifically against low-flying cruise missiles? In scenarios where the enemy uses terrain masking and flies missiles through valleys or mapped routes at very low altitude, could we position soldiers equipped with such portable interceptors manually along those paths to shoot down many incoming missiles? In open plain areas, radars would detect them more easily anyway, but in mountainous or complex terrain, wouldn't this kind of low-tech, distributed defense provide a significant boost against low-flying cruise missiles and aircraft? I'd really appreciate your thoughts on this.
Ukrainians are using manpads to intercept cruise missiles. Problem is, you have to be bloody good to hit anything super fast moving like a cruise missile, particularly low flying ones.
Also, the problem is always detection, and also distribution, are you going to have a soldier every few hundred meters with manpads to intercept something that may come its way? Will it be a qra force etc?
I think fighter jets are an ideal solution to cruise missile threat, particularly in our theatre, GBAD has many limitations, i do wonder, if we had optimised our fighter radars to be able to detect BrahMos and other Cruise missiles, we could come up with a more optmisied aam for this kind of threat to intercept them. This is a very brief write up, but ive got a few more in depth thoughts on such a concept (which isnt new), but ill put them up later.
https://militarnyi.com/en/news/part...rules-to-the-realities-of-the-war-in-ukraine/ Something alot more optimised though