Neptune and Moscow

Roberto da Silva Rocha, university professor and political scientist

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Moscow sinking.

To fire a slow cruise missile against a moving target like a ship in the ocean, a sophisticated intercept operation needs to be performed with the help of millions of trajectory calculations, future point for the intercept and tracking to work.

First you need to find the target, its direction and speed.

For this there are satellites, naval surveillance planes or spy submarines, the collection of information from the relatives of the crew on departures and destinations, and the famous espionage that seeks to discover everything about the crew, the commander and his mission. , mission duration, onboard supplies, departure and arrival dates, destination or en route, and patrol area.

To precisely plan the attack, the naval missile Neptune, which has a range of 65 nautical miles approximately 108 km, with a speed of 800 km per hour will need to hit a moving target after 10 minutes of flight, which means that the target has moved for 10 minutes at 30 knots per hour, about four miles, you'll soon be out of the place where the missile would be ten minutes late, so the missile's trajectory points to a location where the target ship isn't there yet, but its trajectory should be pointing at a future point.

That's where spying comes in: a naval spy plane or data from the military satellite or spy submarine will constantly inform the missile control of its position, to improve efficiency the missile will be aimed at the point right in front of the ship so that the missile finds it at the moment of impact at the same coordinate.

So Ukraine alone without NATO or US help could not get the location and continuous and constant segment data of the naval target.

To avoid another new attack, the Russians will need to break the entire chain of preparation and tracking, guidance and interception that guided the entire trajectory from the moment chosen for the shot, its flight to impact, using satellites, radar tracking, tracking the infrared heat, trajectory interception and correction, and final guidance to impact.

The Russians need to shoot down all enemy military satellites, shoot down the naval observation and spy planes, interfere with the enemy's military data link and computers, track down enemy submarines, i.e. attack the US NATO.