It looks like the government is showing renewed interest in finding mobile missiles. I did that for a while. It’s hard. Essentially, you are looking for a bunch of truck-shaped vehicles that can be on any road or hidden under any cluster of trees next to that road.
Truck on road near NK nuclear facility. Is it a TEL? Would we have found it if it paused under the trees?
Before the INF Treaty was signed, I spent 18 moths chasing Soviet mobile IRBM’s, with essentially zero luck. For that matter, we didn’t have much luck finding US Army Pershing launch units, even when we knew there were x-number of Transporter-Erector-Launcher (TEL) vehicles somewhere on that photo of the tops of hundreds of trees.
SS-20 Launch
By the time of Desert Storm, the first invasion of Iraq, I was a civilian contractor, working on a new mobile GIS front end to the DIA database system. We got called into the Desert Storm operations cell at DIA and the first thing the general in charge said was, “show me the Scud launch pads.” I looked up the identifier for Scud launchers and put it into the DB. Nothing. OK, how about the units themselves? Nothing.The general started ragging on us about our lousy DB, until we pointed out that the system we had build was just a window into the DIA DB.
The analyst for the Iraqi army was called over. “Oh, we don’t track those. They are a Presidential asset, not a military asset.” The general was not pleased.
Later during the war we tried feeding the launch coordinates from our launch warning systems into the DB, and doing an area search, looking for warehouses or bridges the launchers could hide in or under. Not much luck there, either.
Scud TEL with support convoy — It’s easier in the desert
In defense of all our failures, mobile missiles usually don’t need launch pads, as such. Essentially, all they need is a stretch of flat road (or field) strong enough to hold a TEL and missile for half an hour or so. Missile accuracy is improved if you know exactly where the launcher is relative to the target, but modern systems with terminal guidance can even relax that requirement.
Iskander-K Cruise Missile
So, what DoD is asking for is almost an impossibility. It’s true that our satellite and radar and signals collection has improved immensely since I was a lad, but what they are trying to do is find a truck that could be a TEL, part of a SAM site, a coastal radar mount, or a bridgelayer, and say “yep, it’s a TEL”. Good luck with that.
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