Ukraine Should Have No Problem Arming Its Old Soviet Jets With New British Cruise Missiles

The United Kingdom will give Ukraine “longer-range weapons,” U.K. prime minister Rishi Sunak said at a diplomatic conference in Munich on Saturday.

Sunak might be referring to the Royal Air Force’s Storm Shadow—a 2,900-pound, air-launched cruise missile that can travel as far as 155 miles.

Storm Shadow could extend, by scores of miles, the range at which Ukrainian forces can strike targets in Russian-occupied Ukraine or even across the border in Russia itself.

Although to be clear, if the United Kingdom’s diplomatic sensitivities are the same as the United States’ own sensitivities, London will discourage Kyiv from using British-supplied weapons to strike on Russian soil.

The $1-million-plus Storm Shadow is a good match for the Ukrainian air force. Barring a crash effort by Ukraine’s allies to equip the air force with new, Western-style warplanes, the Ukrainians would have to launch Storm Shadows from their existing, Soviet-made jets.

Fortunately for the Ukrainian air force, the missile is highly-autonomous—and thus adaptable to a wide range of plane types.

Storm Shadow belongs to a family of missiles that also includes the German Taurus, the French Scalp and an export missile for Middle East customers called “Black Shaheen.”

Storm Shadow and its cousins have armed Tornado bombers and Mirage 2000, Rafale and Eurofighter fighters. If the Ukrainians get Storm Shadows and if they integrate them on their existing warplane types, someone—contractors from European missile-maker MBDA—will have to integrate the missile with Su-24 bombers or MiG-29 or Su-27 fighters.

It’s not impossible. Note that, last spring, American engineers quickly kluged U.S.-supplied High-Speed Anti-Radiation Missiles onto Ukrainian MiG-29s and Su-27s.

Storm Shadow might be even easier to integrate than HARM was. MBDA’s predecessors designed Storm Shadow for ease-of-use in what Italian air force test pilot Enrico Scarabotto described as “an incredibly low pilot workload cockpit environment.”

Most of the work of programming a Storm Shadow takes place on the ground, before a mission. Technicians use Storm Shadow’s Data Programming System to tell the missile where to strike and at what angle.

Storm Shadow navigates toward GPS coordinates, but corrects its course by scanning the terrain passing below it and matching it to known features. As it approaches its target, the missile pops open its nose to reveal an infrared seeker scans for the target’s heat profile—and guides the weapon to impact.

All that is to say, a pilot doesn’t have to do very much to launch a Storm Shadow except deliver it to an initial point that the missile recognizes. Thus the work of integrating Storm Shadow onto a new plane type mostly involves installing a physical interface—a pylon—and testing the plane-missile pairing to make sure there are no aerodynamic surprises.

If the Ukrainians get Storm Shadows and integrate them on old MiGs and Sukhois, expect the testing to be brief. Kyiv has been begging for longer-range weapons. It’s not going to waste time deploying them.