Russia May Be Showing It’s Running Low On Precision-Guided Munitions

The Pentagon reckons Russia has fired over 1,200 missiles into Ukraine. These largely air-launched cruise missiles rely on advanced guidance systems to navigate to, and in some cases detect, their targets. Such precision-guided munitions (PGMs) are expensive, difficult to source and sometimes unreliable — and Russia may be running short of them.

During a Monday background briefing, an unnamed senior defense official told reporters, “we do think that they are beginning to face some inventory issues with precision-guided munitions, which is one reason why you’re seeing the increasing use of what we would call dumb bombs.”

That assertion joins with a number of circumstantial observations made in recent days by western think tanks, former military officers and media reports.

Russia’s use of Kh-47M2 Kinzhal hypersonic missiles (the first known use of hypersonic missiles in war) has widely been seen as surprising from a tactical viewpoint. President Biden’s confirmation of use of the weapons Monday, came with the comment that Russia unleashed them “because it’s the only thing that they can get through with absolute certainty.”

That assertion fits with a Pentagon thesis that the Kinzhals are also what’s available among a dwindling stockpile of Russian PGMs. In a Sunday appearance on CBS News’ “Face the Nation,” Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin hinted that a lack of available PGMs spurred the hypersonic missile launch. “You kind of question why he would do this. Is he running low on precision-guided munitions?” Austin said.

Bryan Clark, senior fellow and director of the Center for Defense Concepts and Technology at the Hudson Institute, says Russia was also sending a message, demonstrating its hypersonic capability to west and willingness to use it in hope of deterring further western intervention in Ukraine.

Cynthia Cook, director of the Defense-Industrial Initiatives Group at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) agrees. On the other hand, she opines that Russia’s claims of Ukrainian chemical weapons stores (and the White House portrayal of such claims as a sign Putin is mulling their use) does not necessarily point to a shortage of tactical precision weapons.

“The threatened use of chemical weapons is likely a punishment strategy designed to break the will of Ukraine leadership and scare civilians, and while it certainly seems desperate, it does not in and of itself indicate desperate munitions shortages.”

However, resorting to hypersonic weapons for tactical use against low-value targets (the missiles were reportedly fired at a Ukrainian fuel and lubricants storage base) was called a “head scratcher” by the defense official in the aforementioned briefing.

It appears less confusing beside Russia’s nearly two-week-old request for Chinese weapons, supply challenges related to a paucity of trucks, and its now-in-progress cobbled transfer of vehicles and munitions from its far Eastern Military District by ship and rail across Russia.

“It’s pretty clear [that PGMs are running short] from how we’ve seen the munitions usage transition over the course of the conflict,” Clark says. “Part of what [Russia] is doing now is trying to ramp up their use of unguided munitions – artillery, rockets – and using some of their high-end weapons like hypersonic missiles in an effort to try to terrorize the [Ukrainian] population to convince the [Zelensky] government to step down rather than trying to get a traditional military victory. They’re obviously hard-pressed to keep their munitions stocks up.”

“It certainly is reasonable to assume that Russia is having similar problems with their PGM supplies,” Cook agrees. “Guided weapon systems are expensive to produce [a single Javelin missile cost in the neighborhood of $175,000], and the Russian military may not have been able to purchase enough magazine depth to sustain their force at this intensity for months.”

Cook adds that DoD has suggested that Russia is feeling the supply pinch for larger PGMs like the Kalibr cruise missile family and Iskander short range ballistic missiles. With these costing millions of dollars each, Russia has had to make tradeoffs in deciding how many missiles to purchase and stockpile. The Kalibr and Iskander are relatively new weapon systems, she points out, leaving Russia comparatively little time to build significant magazine depth.

Unlike the U.S., the Russian munitions industry is made up of largely state-owned enterprises, Cook says. “Since 2000, Russia has consolidated its defense industry. The two major manufactures of PGMs are Almaz-Antey and Tactical Missiles Corporation. Both are wholly state-owned companies, making their capabilities and financials opaque.”

Even the West is facing pressure on the stocks of guided Stinger anti-air and Javelin anti-tank missiles it has been sending to Ukraine with demand outstripping U.S. production. If America and Europe are having trouble keeping up with demand for PGMs, what does that portend for Russia?

“On the U.S. side the production shortfall is largely because we’ve been building these weapons at the minimum [viable] rate for years,” Clark explains. “The manufacturers have ‘right-sized’ their production lines which means they hand-build a lot of the weapons. When you’re only building a couple dozen weapons a year, it doesn’t make sense to go stand up a [full] production line.”

The Russian side he says has more pressing production capacity issues. The most significant is Russia’s ability to source the sophisticated electronics needed to make precision munitions work. Many of these come from countries like Germany that have now cut off sales of such systems to Putin.

“The Russian arms industry has long realized its dependence on the West,” Cook observes. “The effects of this dependence and Western sanctions will slowly begin to have an impact on Russia’s ability to manufacture PGMs.”

While Russia has designed its own components and has the know-how to build them, it still faces the issue of sourcing their basic building blocks, including high-end semiconductors and printed circuit boards.

“I think the difficulty the Russians have is not just whether they have the production capacity. It’s whether they have the key [components] to install,” Clark affirms. “Some of their PGMs depend on computer chips supplied from outside of Russia. They’re hoping that China may be able to supply those.”

China can provide most of what Russia needs in terms of PGM components but the parts would not be exactly the same, forcing Russian producers to adapt them and to adapt to an outsourced China supply chain. “The question is, how long it takes Russia to adapt such components?” Clark says.

Even China may be limited in what it would theoretically be willing to support Russia with. The country has made considerable progress in standing up its own semiconductor and electronics manufacturing capability but it still lacks the ability to make high-end chips used in warhead seekers and guidance systems. Like everyone else, China sources these from Taiwan and Japan, putting a premium on its own PGM weapons and components stocks.

And to the extent that tech giant Apple has helped China step up its microelectronics game (via a secret deal signed by CEO Tim Cook in 2016) the U.S. may have some leverage via pressuring the firm and its leadership, Clark agrees.

Estimates of Russian supplies of PGMs and conventional munitions are difficult to come by. However a 2019 report from Sweden’s Defense Research Agency (FOI) suggested that insufficient Russian investment in PGMs was a factor which western analysis ignored, overrating Russia’s anti-access, area-denial systems.

The maintenance of Russian weapons stockpiles may be another area western analysts have overlooked. Conventional bombs and bullets don’t require much maintenance but they do have shelf-lives. These can be several decades long, or in the case of the increasing worldwide stocks of bombs/ammunition with performance-enhancing Nanoenergetic materials (nEMs), around a decade.

PGMs are more complex, Cook points out. While there is no reliable unclassified reporting on how well Russia maintains its precision munitions, she says, “It is reasonable to assume that since these systems and the strike capability they provide, are central to Russian doctrine, their maintenance is better than the rest of the Russian military.”

Clark says most Russian PGMs have a shelf-life of about 10-15 years and so are not likely aging out but, “I would assume that they have not been extremely well-maintained judging by the rest of their systems like their vehicles.”

Recent Pentagon comments may line up with this train of thought. In Monday’s DoD briefing the unnamed official said, “we’ve also seen them suffer failures of some of their precision-guided munitions, where it — they’re just not — they’re not operating. They’re not — they’re — they’re failing. Either they’re failing to launch or they’re failing to hit the target, or they’re failing to explode on contact. So we’re seeing them have some struggles with respect to precision-guided munitions.”

Some of the failures may just as meaningfully be ascribed to the aircraft, ships and land-launchers firing the PGMs, Cynthia Cook posits. “What is far harder to maintain is the platforms [PGMs] operate from. So, while a tank shell does not take that much work to take care of, the tank it operates from is a complex weapon system with significant maintenance requirements.”

As significant may be the incautious fashion in which Russia has expended its PGMs Clark suggests. “They felt like they could get this quick victory and they were being less discerning in how they delivered weapons. Now they have a shortfall.”