Making Missiles Smart: Instrumentation for Guidance, Telemetry, and Command and Control

Technologically advanced missile systems are those missiles that have robust technological features to improve the lethal capabilities of the missile, either strengthening their combat prowess or their deterrent capability.

One of the critical requirements in today’s missile systems is the need for such technologies to be accurate. Accuracy strengthens deterrence, both conventional and weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Nevertheless, the accuracy of missile systems is reliant on many factors. These factors include both internal and external conditions to reckon with. There are many technological means through which accuracy can be either stabilized or improved. Instrumentation is crucial in missile technology to strengthen a missile’s accuracy.

Missiles need technological attention right from their launch. A ballistic missile has four phases: boost phase, ascent boost phase, mid-course phase, and terminal phase. At every phase of its flight trajectory, instrumentation is required for accurate functioning. Instrumentation also helps the missile enable trajectory corrections when needed. With standoff capabilities, both ballistic and cruise missiles require integration for interoperability with their standoff delivery systems, for which instrumentation plays a critical part. Guidance systems are developed and improved for increasing the accuracy of missile systems, and this is done with the help of instrumentation engineers.

One of the key aspects that enable proper functioning of a weapon system is robust command and control that requires advanced command and control centers. All data regarding the target and defensive mechanisms of adversaries are gathered and processed to enable right decision-making in times of crisis with the help of instrumentation. These data require processing at super speeds when they involve high-speed missile systems like hypersonic weapons.

Instrumentation aids in monitoring engines of missile systems. In cruise missiles, especially high-speed weapons with air-breathing technologies using scramjet or ramjet, instrumentation is essential from the developmental phase to ensuring that these engines provide reliable performance.

Hypersonic missiles require ruggedness and hence face design challenges since they need to withstand material degradation at high speed and temperature fluctuations. They also require aerodynamic pressure sensors, optical sensors, inertial sensors, and many more, which are combined into a single guidance system by sensor fusion. These are maintained and controlled by instrumentation engineering. In anti-satellite weapons (ASAT), the guidance system needs to steer the missile to target adversary satellites, and the ASAT missile can successfully intercept the satellite and destroy it.

Telemetry systems in missiles transmit data from a missile to ground systems, and there are also telemetry standards for missiles to transmit data. Such telemetry systems can also be airborne or shipborne, crucial during flight tests or operational deployment. In 1991, when the Arleigh Burke DDG-51 AEGIS-class destroyer was commissioned, high-quality cabling systems were made to transmit data to Portable Telemetry Data Receive/Record Sets (TDRRS). Instrumentation resolves the complexities of transmitting data and also analyzing it accurately.

Even in submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), instrumentation engineering is very crucial. This is especially so as SLBMs can carry nuclear warheads. Hence, all the parameters of the missile system need to be perfected to prevent nuclear catastrophe.

Modern-day warfare has become network-centric in nature, and success is dependent on the perfect amalgamation of different devices and their subsystems and their accurate integrations. Decision-making for swift and cataclysmic results requires a digitized decision-making process, and hence, every feature and aspect in network-centric warfare is functioning on a network-based process. This requires a greater capacity for simulations and calculations to function under challenging circumstances, made possible due to instrumentation.

This means a missile that is considered a delivery platform for warheads and operates singularly under a platform-centric environment can also function under a network-centric environment with multiple other weapon systems with the help of instrumentation engineering functioning for both platform-centric operations and network-centric operations. It must be noted that only when the missile has functioned successfully in its platform-centric operations can it function successfully in its network-centric operations.

Hence, instrumentation is crucial from the platform-centric mode itself in order to make the missile operable with other weapon systems, which could include missiles and missile defense systems. This task is a cumbersome process and requires a meticulous approach at every step, especially since each weapon system functions differently. In Aegis, defensive missiles like the Evolved Sea Sparrow Missile (ESSM) receive uplink transmission and respond to it with a downlink transmission. On the other hand, all Standard Missiles except Standard Missile-1, which also function as anti-ship missiles, use uplink and downlink transmissions. Thus, during crisis situations, an offensive missile will have to be networked with such defensive systems operating in different network modes.

Advancements in missile technologies have evolved, and it is also a continuous process and not a stagnant one. This continuous process has been made possible through innovations in the technological field. In this innovation process, engineering has played a crucial role in shaping the future of modern weapon systems, among which instrumentation is one field. Missiles are continuously undergoing advancements in technology, and these advancements are facilitated by greater engineering mechanisms.

Debalina Ghoshal is the author of the book Role of Ballistic and Cruise Missiles in International Security.

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