LORA at Sea

Scott LaFoy 0:02

That's the missile equivalent of I'm not touching you.

Jeffrey Lewis 0:08

You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk podcast, the leading podcast on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. I'm Jeffrey Lewis, the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk blog, and a scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

Aaron Stein 0:25

And I'm Aaron Stein, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Refugee Career Center for the Middle East.

Jeffrey 0:31

How you doing, Aaron?

Aaron 0:32

I'm doing well. I'm doing well. It's a very nice weather day here in Washington, D.C.

Jeffrey 0:37

It was pretty nice today. I had a tough choice in front of me.

Aaron 0:40

I want to know what those choices were.

Jeffrey 0:42

I had to decide whether I went to the place to get the lox bagel that had the better lox or the place that had the better bagel.

Aaron 0:50

That seems like an important policy conundrum.

Jeffrey 0:54

It was really tough. I ended up deciding to go with a utility maximization approach.

Scott 1:02

Send an intern to each restaurant?

Jeffrey 1:04

No, no, no. I ended up at the Better Bagel place because the difference between the bagels was larger than the difference between the lox. Is that a little game theory there? I got a lot of helpful comments on Twitter. Somebody suggested go to the place with the better cream cheese. I got my coffee at a third place.

Aaron 1:26

How do you have time to go to these three different places? Well, we were supposed to record this at 1030. That is right. That is right. So a little later in the day. And so you have more time in the morning.

Jeffrey 1:38

So I went and got a lox bagel.

Aaron 1:40

Yeah, yeah. But it's important that we're here. So in keeping a tradition with the pod, you launch a missile, you get a pod.

Jeffrey 1:49

Yeah, Israel launched its Long Range Attack, or LORA, missile, and it launched it off a ship.

Aaron 1:56

Yeah, and again, they launched it off of a truck on a ship carrying a canister that looks like a shipping container, just to keep up with that trend in missile proliferation.

Jeffrey 2:09

Yeah, I really don't understand why they didn't just put the canister on the ship, but they drove the truck with the canister or the container onto the ship, and then they launched it off the truck, off the ship.

Aaron 2:21

So, you know, and it isn't the first test of the system, so it's not like they had some sort of Baloney excuse that they can come up that they needed more space. You know what I mean? Even in the most polite way of telling, it's like, no, I think they were trying to tell us something. And I think this is advertising.

Well, because the reason we know about the launch, we should say, is that they put out a video.

Jeffrey 2:45

Yeah, I think they want to sell people LORA. And if you're a tin pot dictator and you want to have some, it's called long range, but it's actually not really that long range of a system. I mean, technically what? It's a close range ballistic missile.

Aaron 2:59

I think they call it, I mean, it's advertised as basically long range artillery. It's in the Atacoms family in terms of what it's supposed to be used for. Right.

Jeffrey 3:10

But, you know, you want to hide those in shipping containers and then whack your adversaries. It's fun times.

Aaron 3:16

Yeah. I went back and watched the Russian video where they shoot off the club. It's a cruise missile, but from a shipping container. That one was set to like techno music. This one was less exciting. Yeah.

Jeffrey 3:33

Well, it was less exciting except for there was that absurd image of the boat with the truck on it. And the truck is, you know, like crosswise across the boat. Right. Yeah. I mean, I thought it was a good opportunity to talk about Israel for a couple of reasons. I mean, one is there was some fun geolocation.

So we've been really interested in Israel's missile program. And largely, I think, for at least me, because of LORA, because I'm very interested in the proliferation of solid fuel missiles. And I think that people are not... Sort of waking up to how quickly these capabilities are spreading. There was a fun bit of geolocation because in the 1990s, there was an article in Janes that had really terrible satellite photographs that identified the Israeli aerospace industry's Malam plant.

And people had forgotten where it was. And so for a while, people were identifying the wrong facility as being the plant. And I actually, I re-geolocated it because the architects who built the visitor center put the pictures online.

Aaron 4:53

There's a tendency to do this, to people post a lot of pictures online that allow you to get certain terrain features, which then allow you to then go find things.

Jeffrey 5:04

Well, and this is like a really fancy, super modern visitor center. And so it's like many kinds of modern architecture, very, very distinct. And so when they put the picture of the outside of the building, it really was not very complicated to then go ahead and find the building matching it. There's also a picture inside it, and it's got an Arrow 1, an Arrow 2, and a LORA mock-up in the kind of atrium.

Scott 5:34

Oh, really? I didn't know that.

Jeffrey 5:35

Oh, yeah. It seems like it'd be a nice place to have a cocktail party. You know, you could just sort of lean against the LORA and, you know, pontificate.

Aaron 5:42

Yeah, I mean, I think the LORA's worth Delving into a little bit more because, I mean, it looks like they're designing it for export. And then Israel's missile program is always a source of fascination because of its, obviously, interlinguages with the nuclear program.

Jeffrey 6:00

Yeah, and I think it's especially interesting because one of the ideas that we'll talk about in a different podcast is there's this kind of sense that the South Korean short-range ballistic missile, the Hunmoo-2, That it's somehow related to Russia's Iskander because they look the same. But the LORA also looks the same, and I would argue so does the U.S. Atacom system, and that has more to do with the fact that This is what really capable, short-range, solid-fueled ballistic missiles look like.

It's not any kind of evidence of design heritage. And I think the really, the interesting thing about LORA as a missile, and actually those other missiles, is that they are, I'm trying to, like, keep this G-rated, but I can't. They're short but thick. Scott, you called them chode missiles. The hard thing with solid-fueled motors is making the big diameters.

So I think for a lot of countries, we've seen long-range rocket artillery that's pretty narrow and long. And that's because they kind of suck at making the motors. And when you see the United States or the Russians, and then I would argue the South Koreans and the Israelis, they're good at making large diameter, solid field motors. And so that's what the short range missiles tend to look like.

They tend to be really, really large in terms of their diameter relative to their height. So they're kind of short and squatty. And then they've got a, you know, big, long nose cone on them.

Aaron 7:35

Yeah. And, Well, I mean, I want to just unpack that a little bit more because the design similarities, again, do you think are indicative of broader performance? I mean, if they all look the same way, as you just said, I mean, what is that telling us other than the fact that the Israelis make missiles well?

Jeffrey 7:57

Well, so it only tells you that the Israelis make missiles well, but I wanted to highlight that. I mean, I think the thing to say is this, is that, you know, for those of us who are policy... Policy-focused. The technology's only interesting insofar as it answers policy questions. And so when I take a technical approach, I try to understand what some technical thing means from a policy perspective.

And so with liquid-fueled engines, there is this sense, which is accurate, that if you know how the engines work and you know how they are created, right, they're basically a lot of plumbing... That you can spot design heritage in the plumbing, right? You can see things that relate one liquid-fueled missile to another in terms of heritage. I think that from a policy perspective, that's not really true of solid-fueled missiles.

There are some small things that you might be able to use to infer heritage, but generally speaking, you can't. The only thing you can do is, I think you can observe that if you're seeing these larger diameter, shorter rockets, that's indicative of just a better missile program, a better solid-fueled missile program. Because, you know, the big challenge as you move to longer range solid-fueled missiles is increasing the diameter.

So if you can If that's not a problem for you, what you're going to do is have the relatively large diameter motor, and then you're going to just, you know, reduce the length. And that's a different arrangement than, for example, you see with some Iranian solid-fueled motors, which still, to me, look pretty narrow, and I think that's a sign that they aren't quite as good at this.

So, you know, like, As a policy person, liquid-fueled rockets and solid-fueled rockets are really different, right? And we can look at liquid-fueled rockets, and I think we can make judgments about design heritage, and I think we cannot look at solid-fueled rockets and make those same judgments. We just can only sort of look at them and say, oh, you look like you're relatively good at this.

Aaron 10:03

Yeah, and so that's what I was trying to pick up on, but it didn't lead you very well, is they have a long history of missile-making. I think what makes the LORA... Fascinating is, again, it's representative, I think, you know, of these long-range artillery systems, more or less, similar to the Atacoms. But also the fact that they stuck it in a container, you know, and so they have an idea on the export market and then how...

How weird that is. I mean, I don't know how else to say it. I mean, it's so weird that you don't think of Israel as stashing something in a container and then putting out what is a marketing video where they're basically saying that you can fire this without anybody figuring out where you're firing it from.

Jeffrey 10:48

Yeah, I think it's a really interesting question because, you know, the idea that we're going to have survivable forces for retaliation, whether they're nuclear or conventional, It's generally something we think of as stabilizing. But it's not clear to me that that's true if we're worried about shorter range systems or I guess the new term is close range systems that might appear on ships.

I mean, I remember in the 1990s, there was this incredible paranoia that my friend Mark Shands and I used to laugh at all the time. People would say sort of scuds on ships, right?

Aaron 11:31

People were terrified of scuds on ships. The Rumsfeld Missile Commission.

Jeffrey 11:35

Yeah. And I, you know, that's, I mean, we kind of make fun of it, but it does, I think, get to this interesting question for stability, which is, is there something somehow more threatening and therefore potentially escalating about a system like that? And then obviously the other piece, and I think this is a huge problem for the INF Treaty now, is verification.

You know, the ability to verify the location of these systems if they are sort of routinely packaged up in shipping container looking things is pretty tough. And so if you imagine some kind of arms control arrangement, You're going to have to verify those at the plant. Once they get sort of out into the wild, they're going to be pretty hard to find.

So it is this kind of interesting shift that we've seen where we increasingly see countries trying to disguise missiles in shipping containers. You mentioned the club with the terrible disco music.

Aaron 12:42

I didn't say the disco music was terrible. I said the disco music was awesome. Don't put words in my mouth.

Scott 12:50

That's why it's named The Club, after all.

Jeffrey 12:52

That's right. It's The Club. It's got club music. But also remember the Taiwanese hid their... tried to hide their long-range cruise missiles on vehicles that were painted to look like delivery trucks.

Aaron 13:09

That's the old archive pod. You can go dig it out.

Jeffrey 13:12

Yeah, so that's a whole other really interesting, I think, set of questions about stability.

Aaron 13:17

I mean, if we talk about the range of the system, I mean, I think the advertised range is about 250 miles. So it's kind of one of these range skirting systems.

Jeffrey 13:29

Yeah, I have to say, do you believe any of these estimates when people say, I mean, it ranges 90 to 300 kilometers, which is the MTCR limit. You know, so just there's this sort of assertion that the range goes right up to the point at which it would run afoul of the missile technology control regime, but doesn't go over it.

Aaron 13:54

No, I don't... But I don't believe that at all. No, neither do I. You can script tests to ensure that the farthest it flies doesn't exceed the MTCR limits by messing around with the payload weight. And... I mean, that's just about it. I mean, but what I do find instructive is that companies like this, you know, the Israeli aerospace industries, is marketing video inside canister with MTCR compliant ranges.

And so they're setting themselves up from the outset to sell it. Yep. And I think that builds into the question, not question, but the assertion That we've made on a few pods now, which is forget liquid, solids are coming.

Jeffrey 14:46

Yeah, I mean, I don't know if you've had a chance to look at the new National Air and Space Intelligence Center report on the ballistic and cruise missile threat. I have not. So every couple of years, NASIC releases one of these. And this is the first year that they broke out this new category that they're calling close range ballistic missiles.

And it's basically the shitload of Chinese solid fueled artillery rockets. Plus all these other systems like LORA. There are a lot of them. I mean, there are just a ton of them, and they are all running up against that MTCR limit. And, you know, I mean, the thing about LORA, again, to go back to that earlier point, is because it's got this relatively large diameter, you know, that is, you know, indicative of a growing capability that could express itself in, I think, much longer range systems.

Aaron 15:48

Yeah, I mean, what do you think about that within the context of Israel? I mean, they have longer range systems. I mean, what do you think beyond the export? Why do you think they developed this thing?

Jeffrey 16:02

Well, so I think that if we go back to the Taiwan case, you know, the reason that we think that the Taiwanese missiles were initially going to be Israeli is Is that the Israelis told the U S that they had made this offer to Iran and that they were going to build a scaled down version of the Jericho missile.

That would be a much shorter range system. Now you would call it a close range ballistic missile system. That they called a poor man's lance. And at the time, they talked about all of the ways in which that system, which they wanted to sell to the Iranians, was unsatisfactory to them, right? I mean, even calling it poor man's lance kind of like tells you that you think it sucks, right?

Aaron 16:51

Yeah.

Jeffrey 16:53

And so my sense is the Israelis always had the ability to make Better solid-fueled missiles in terms of the engines. But what we're into now is a modern period of better electronics where the inertial navigation system is better and they can take advantage of GPS. And so now you have things that are really accurate. And, I mean, I think that's something we see more broadly.

And I think it's the reason we see, like, so damn many Chinese rocket artillery systems for sale, is that in the past, you know, if you ask someone, like, what's the difference between a short-range ballistic missile and rocket artillery, right, because they're both rockets, you know, one of the tests would be, like, well, artillery is unguided, right?

But now guidance is so much better and it's so much cheaper that I think you're seeing a proliferation of systems in this space and they kind of all blur into one another. I mean, the Israelis advertise the LORA as having an accuracy of like 10 meters. Yeah, I saw that. I mean... And... You know, maybe that's true, maybe that's not true, but it's... You know, that's...

It can't be that untrue because your potential clients are going to be super pissed off, right, when they actually, like, take the thing for a spin.

Aaron 18:23

Yeah, I mean, it's a trend, I mean, to use, you know, artillery rockets actually in conflicts. I mean, I should say... Guided artillery rockets with GPS. You saw the U.S. introduction of ATACOMs into Afghanistan and current use with them in Syria and both Iraq. You know, it's not completely out of the norm that countries will try and emulate, at least incorporate, what is a now ubiquitous or at least largely used U.S. system for their own uses and then look to sell it.

Jeffrey 19:00

Right. Well, and we just did the podcast on Turkey, right? So the Turks are also interested in this capability. So yeah, I do think we are entering this really interesting period where the enabling technologies are much more available. And so we're going to see a lot of these systems, and some of them will be crappy artillery, right?

But actually, I do think some of them will give birth to more capable missile programs. And I'm just not sure that we're Prepared for this coming era. I mean, I think people were caught pretty flat footed by the North Koreans moving to solid fuel. Even though they shouldn't have been. And we've kind of forgotten the lesson of the 1980s where the Israelis were helping the South Africans and the Taiwanese with a solid-fueled missile program, and the Argentinians and the Egyptians and the Iraqis were working on a solid-fueled missile program together.

I mean, that moment of proliferation almost happened and then kind of stopped, right? The Shah fell, and the Taiwanese gave it up under pressure, and the South Africans democratized, and... You know, we waxed Saddam and the Argentinians got rid of their military dictatorship. And I'm not actually sure the Egyptians stopped their program, but that's for another podcast.

But we kind of got out of that era of solid-fueled missile proliferation and then ended up focusing on these liquid-fueled missiles provided by the North Koreans. But I don't think that that means the solid-fuel problem went away. I think it's about to come back with a vengeance.

Aaron 20:32

So, There is a positive and negative aspect to this story. The negative aspect is that you're describing another potential wave of missile proliferation, or at least more capable missile proliferation. The positive aspect is that there'll be more missile launches and more podcasts. Can I put a policy solution out there before we wrap up? Can we ban the shipping container canister?

Could that be a goal?

Jeffrey 21:04

I guess. I mean, my concern is a canister is a canister. I mean, I don't know... People can make square canisters. So, you know, I think we're just kind of... I think we're just stuck in this era. I mean, what I think I would say is that...

Scott 21:24

I don't know. I don't know. I don't know that it's possible.

Jeffrey 21:27

I mean, it would be great... I think, if the Russians and others didn't make it easy for countries to buy these capabilities to put them in shipping containers.

Aaron 21:39

But, I don't know. I'm not sure it's feasible. I'll be okay with the Russians if that keeps heading their promotional videos to bad techno music.

Jeffrey 21:48

Oh, now you're admitting it's terrible.

Aaron 21:50

Oh, it's so bad it's good.

Jeffrey 21:58

Yeah. So, anyway, I think the LORA is a pretty interesting missile. I think Israel's MLM plant is an interesting place to keep an eye on. We've got some interesting ideas about that. Aaron, do you remember Deep Strike? What about Deep Strike? So, apropos of the conversation about the Israelis... Yeah, go ahead.

Aaron 22:23

The Atacoms.

Jeffrey 22:25

Yes, the Israelis say that the range of LORA is 300 kilometers. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. The stated range of the Atacom's follow-on is 499 kilometers. Right, exactly. I.e., not INF violating.

Scott 22:42

Yeah. Oh, please. That's the missile equivalent of, I'm not touching you. I'm not touching you. I'm not touching you.

Aaron 22:53

Yeah, we all do it, man. I mean, but it feeds your broader point. The technologies are becoming as such to where the threshold to develop more capable systems amongst relatively mature missile powers is not all that high. There is a demand for long-range guided artillery. And so you have companies that are trying to carve out a market while staying at least notionally involved in the MTCR, but then doing silly things like putting them in canisters to get a leg up on potential competitors.

This is weird.

Jeffrey 23:30

Well, and I think this goes to the heart of the problem that the MTCR is facing, which is the normative rationale for the MTCR is that the countries that were buying these missiles were only doing so so that they could deliver nuclear weapons. Exactly. And the idea was that missiles were too inaccurate for any purpose other than delivering a nuclear weapon.

And so if you had a 300 kilometer range missile, the guidance for that would be so poor that putting conventional warheads on it would be foolish. But what we've seen, I think, in the intervening years is first, that idea that it would be foolish was not widely shared, right? The Iraqis and the Iranians decided even with really inaccurate missiles, they got some mileage out of rocketing each other.

But now, missiles are more accurate, and it does, I think, make sense to fire them with conventional payloads. And so the MTCR has this problem of having created this test for what is a nuclear-capable system, but those systems actually have legitimate conventional uses. And so I think it is really hard... To make the normative case for the MTCR now, because you can't simply look at the LORA, which, you know, whatever, it says 300 kilometers, but you and I know it could probably go further than that.

That's truly a conventional system. I mean, it may also be a nuclear system for the Israelis. You know, I don't know. But I can see a country sincerely saying that, you know, I, you know, we wanted ATACMS from the United States. They would not sell them. The Chinese ones suck. I want a LORA and I want it for conventional payloads and you can whine all you want about the MTCR, but you know, this is truly a conventional missile.

And I think that's just possible because the guidance technologies are so much better. So, you know, I think the MTCR is in a fair amount of trouble because guidance is getting so good. That's deep fecal material. Right. Although, as you say, the upside is probably a lot more podcasts. That's a happy note.

Scott 25:45

You know what the other upside is? At least the INF Treaty is in totally good condition right now.

Jeffrey 25:52

That's another pod. Oh, that's dark. Yeah. I mean, this is a, this actually, it is another pod. I mean, there's a pod here to be had about the INF treaty, but there's another pod to be had about how we think about controlling missile proliferation. Because and this is way too much and maybe Scott, you'll want to cut this out.

I don't know, but Mike Horowitz just had a nice article on trying to take some drones out of the MTCR. Where they don't really fit, and even if they technically count, no one is going to follow the MTCR. I think the MTCR really is organized around a technological world that no longer exists, and its idea of a kind of small cartel isn't terribly...

Reasonable anymore because there are plenty of countries that have these capabilities, at least two of whom are outside of the regime. And so missiles are proliferating pretty quickly, and it's not clear to me that the MTCR is really up to the task of dealing with that problem. I think it needs a lot of help. This is a dark way to end a podcast.

Yeah, I don't know what to say. Hey, Scott, why don't you cheer us up and tell us how things are going over there on the Slack channel?

Scott 27:17

Yeah, the Slack channel is going well. We actually, this is a little less of a proliferation thing. We just started a Steam group so that some of us can play video games together on the weekend. So it's a lovely place for camaraderie and enthusiasm about nuclear weapons and missiles and apparently now some video games. For $3 a month, you too can join us in all of our arms control-oriented merriment.

And if anyone from Raytheon is listening and has promotional materials for the Deep Strike missile, go ahead and send that to armscontrolwonkpodcast at gmail.com with whatever music you think would be most appropriate, because I'm really looking forward to those advertisements.

Jeffrey 27:56

And you too can have special access to the Slack page for a mere $3 million a month.

Scott 28:02

We have special rates for arms contractors.

Jeffrey 28:04

Aaron? Aaron? Thank you for joining me, and thank you for listening.