RBS15 Missile Family – A Common Solution for India
Modern militaries are increasingly looking towards incorporating smart weapons and systems into their arsenals, leading to the adaptation of cruise missile technology to an increasing number of battle spaces. Agile, precise, maneuverable, and smaller yet effective forces are the need of the hour for the asymmetric nature of today’s military conflicts.
The RBS15 missile family, comprised of the RBS15 Mk3 and the RBS15F ER, has the potential to become the common missile for many attack purposes with its unique flexibility and ability to be launched from various platforms.
The RBS15 Mk3 represents the latest generation of advanced surface-to-surface missile (SSM) systems. It is a true fire and forget, multi-purpose anti-ship/land attack, sea skimming, cruise type missile. The missile possesses a high hit probability due to a flexible, pre-launch programmable, active radar seeker.
The state-of-the-art design of the RBS15 Mk3 results in high availability, reliability and maintainability, with long maintenance intervals, thus resulting in a very low cost of ownership during the system’s specified lifetime of 30 years.
The RBS15F ER is the latest generation air-to-surface version in the RBS15 missile family. It can be launched from both fighter aircraft and reconnaissance aircraft. The RBS15 missile is designed to operate in the naval scenario, from blue water conditions to littoral warfare and in land attack missions. It can be launched from ship, land and airborne platforms making it suitable for a wide spectrum of threat scenarios. The long flight range and extremely flexible trajectory enables attacks from short distances to ranges well beyond the horizon. Attacks can also be mounted from different directions with pre-selected time of arrival for each missile as well as simultaneous arrival.
Saab’s RBS15 missile family has proven potential to meet the existing and future requirements of all branches within the Indian Armed Forces. Saab sees the RBS15Mk3 as an excellent complement to already existing Brahmos systems, in such a way that it will provide enhanced flexibility at a much lower life-cycle cost.