What the Zircon Missile May Tell Us About the Future of Naval Warfare

Back in 2008 the Russian government spoke publicly about ambitions for a vast blue-water navy with perhaps a half dozen carrier battle groups sailing the seas.

It was an extravagant vision--going far beyond anything the Soviet Union attempted in the Cold War.

Of course, the Russian government never realized that vision.

In wondering what happened to it one might wonder where it came from. Simply put, when the announcement was made Russia was growing fast--with per capita Gross Domestic Product growth in the vicinity of over 7 percent between 1999 and 2008. This was in large part a matter of recovery from the horrid rock bottom of its '90s collapse, and the surging of oil prices (hitting $150 a barrel that summer, which is more like $200 a barrel in today's dollars). All this could not go on forever, but had it somehow maintained that growth rate (optimally, through the development of its manufacturing base picking up as oil prices stabilized or declined) the mid-2020s one would have seen a Russian economy with a solidly First World income level in nominal terms, bringing together affluence and scale in a combination without peer save for the U.S..*

The fact that Russia, if not doing so badly as those ever-eager to predict its collapse suggest, did not enjoy such a run of growth, and so did not enjoy the resources it would have provided, would seem quite enough to have led to a change of plans.

Still, it seems possible to imagine that this was not the only factor, especially if one considers the trend in Russia's naval construction. Basically coming to a halt with the Soviet collapse, it revived in the mid-2000s--and emphasized smaller, mostly coastally-oriented, surface warships and submarines. To some extent this seems merely a continuation of the norm with the preceding, Soviet, navy, which had always invested heavily in such forces. However, it seems to have gone further in that direction than before. While modernizing its big cruisers, and continuing to operate the one Kuznetsov-class carrier it retained, the biggest surface ship it produced was a 5,000-ton frigate, the Admiral Gorshkov-class ships. And now the biggest it seems to have planned is a somewhat bigger version of those ships (the "Super Gorshkovs").

In short, Russia stopped building big surface ships--even as it pursued an increasingly vigorous program of construction of high-tech smaller ships, and submarines, including large, advanced, nuclear-powered vessels.

Considering this one factor that seems relevant is the advance in cruise missile development we are hearing about, epitomized by Russian claims to not only have developed, but to be actually deploying, hypersonic cruise missiles in the form of the Zircon. The Russian navy, while having its advocates of a blue-water force, has also long had those who regarded big ships as having been rendered less useful by advances in anti-ship weaponry--like the large, supersonic anti-ship missiles they built during the Cold War as the U.S. and other Western countries refrained (like the AS-4 Kitchen, or AS-16 Kickback).

For the time being, of course, it seems that little is independently known about the operability, let alone the actual performance, of the Zircon--every press report of successful tests of the weapon apparently emanating from Russian government sources rather than any independent assessments. Still, one could easily imagine Russian naval planners, having had reason to expect the technology would actually be realized (in contrast with so many of those that prove "vaporware"), the more easily deciding against large warships as a poor investment from the standpoint of plain and simple sea power.

* With the Russian economy, which had a per capita GDP of $11,600 in 2008 (or $15,800 in 2022 terms if one goes by the U.S. Consumer Price Index), growing at the 7.3 percent a year average for 1999-2008 for the next fourteen years would have worked out to a per capita GDP of $42,000 for the country of 146 million--and a GDP of over $6 trillion, versus Germany's $4.5 trillion today. Were one to use Purchasing Power Parity-adjusted figures Russia would have done better still. With Russia's 2008 PPP-adjusted per capita GDP in the $20,000 range the same growth rate would have raised that GDP to a still more impressive $54,000, and the country's aggregate figure to the vicinity of $8 trillion.