ATACMS will allow Ukraine to keep up its strikes for longer.
MONTH BY MONTH Ukraine’s wishlist of weapons has shrunk. At the start of the war came Javelins and Stingers to take out tanks and planes. Then came artillery. HIMARS rocket-launchers followed in the summer. This January it was tanks. And in August the White House even agreed that European allies could send F-16 jets.
Only one major weapon was left: the Army Tactical Missile System, known by its acronym ATACMS (pronounced attack ’ems). On September 21st that hurdle fell when Joe Biden, America’s president, told Volodymyr Zelensky, his Ukrainian counterpart, during a meeting in the White House, that “a small number” of ATACMS were on their way, according to reports in the American press the following day. The move, first reported by NBC News, has not been formally announced.
ATACMS has acquired totemic status during the war. It is a ballistic missile that can be fired from the HIMARS launchers Ukraine is already operating. Thus far those have mostly fired GPS-guided rockets known as GMLRS, which can travel 70km or so. The initial appeal of ATACMS was that it could go a lot further—the official range is 300km—allowing Ukraine to reach even those facilities which Russia had moved farther behind the front lines.
In recent months range has become a less pressing concern. Russia has hardened and dispersed many of its facilities, making it harder to hit them. Britain and France have also given Ukraine long-range cruise missiles, Storm Shadow and SCALP respectively, that have pounded Russian positions, most recently the headquarters of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in Crimea on September 22nd.
But ATACMS still has significant military value. For one thing, the British and French missiles are scarce in number and Ukraine has used up many during the summer. The head of France’s air force recently acknowledged that his country would soon have to stop deliveries in order to protect its own stocks.
Fabian Hoffmann, an analyst at the University of Oslo, has estimated that Ukraine, firing around 75 missiles per month, would run out of them some time between October and January. “Ukraine retains a long-range strike capability until early next year,” notes Mr Hoffmann. “But then it’s over.” Another missile previously promised by America, the 150km-range Ground-Launched Small Diameter Bomb (GLSDB), which was supposed to arrive this autumn, now appears to be delayed by months.
The main value of ATACMS is to supplement this pool of long-range missiles, allowing Ukraine to keep up its strike campaign for longer than would otherwise be possible. That will be especially important to keep Russia on the back foot through the winter, even when Ukraine’s ground offensive will have paused because of weather conditions and a shortage of shells.
What is not clear is how many ATACMS will be sent: production is limited and American generals are wary of giving up too many, one reason why Mr Biden dallied for so long. In a recent interview with The War Zone, a website, Lieutenant General Kyrylo Budanov, Ukraine’s military intelligence chief, said that “if it’s 100 missiles, this won’t change the situation.” Ukraine, he insisted, needed “at least hundreds”.
The second advantage is that ATACMS works differently from the Anglo-French missiles. Storm Shadow and SCALP are cruise missiles, which use air-breathing jet engines and fly on low and flat trajectories, like planes. They are also designed to penetrate hardened targets. ATACMS is a ballistic missile which flies high into the air before plunging down at supersonic speeds. It reaches a target around three times quicker than the cruise missiles, which makes it useful to strike moving targets. The trajectory and high speed also pose a different sort of challenge to Russian air defences.
A third factor is the particular sort of ATACMS that America may send. One version has a “unitary” warhead, which means that it carries a single explosive charge—about 50% greater than the smaller, shorter-range GMLRS. But another type—the one Ukraine seems more likely to get—carries a cluster warhead, containing a large number of small bomblets.
America fired many of these in Iraq in 1991 and 2003, though it later restricted their use because of concern over unexploded bomblets. The advantage of a cluster warhead is that it can strike targets dispersed over a wider area, and can knock out a single sprawling target, like an air base. Doing the same thing with a unitary warhead would use up far too many scarce and expensive missiles.
Ukrainian commanders will celebrate the arrival of a new, long-range, highly capable system that will allow them to keep pounding high-value Russian targets for longer, and more effectively. Yet the political symbolism of ATACMS may prove to be just as important. Critics, in Ukraine and even within the American government, saw Mr Biden’s reluctance to send the missiles as a sign of timidity. His reversal on the issue is a sign of trust: one reason for his earlier hesitation was a concern that the missiles could theoretically strike deeper into Russia and be seen as a serious escalation.
Mr Biden’s decision might also have happy knock-on effects. Olaf Scholz, Germany’s chancellor, has been under pressure to follow Britain and France in sending long-range Taurus cruise missiles. These have particularly advanced fuses, which count how many layers they have penetrated, and can thus do more damage to complex targets like bridges. Mr Scholz has, so far, refused. Now that Mr Biden has broken the last serious taboo on weapons deliveries, Mr Zelensky’s hope is that Swedish-German missiles may not be far behind. ■
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