Airplanes are unique among battlefield targets: hard to hit, but easy to kill. Even the least capable of them can reach speeds measured in hundreds of miles per hour and altitudes measured in tens of thousands of feet. Even the clumsiest can maneuver in three dimensions. Even the most robust airplane, however, is basically fragile: slender structural members and a thin skin wrapped around delicate electronic, hydraulic, and mechanical systems; highly volatile fuel; and a pilot whose only personal “armor” is a cloth flight suit and plastic helmet. Unlike a building, ship, or land vehicle, an airplane cannot be “hardened” against enemy fire except in limited ways and at a terrible cost in performance. Its best defense is its ability to avoid being hit; when that defense fails and a projectile hits, damage is virtually certain. Guided missiles made attractive antiaircraft weapons for two reasons: they increased the chances of a hit, and increased the chances of a hit causing lethal damage.

Both superpowers developed antiaircraft missiles during the 1950s, and both did so with the problem of homeland defense firmly in mind. ICBMs were still in their technological infancy in the late 1950s—crude, inaccurate, and unreliable—and the piloted bomber was still the weapon of choice for long-range strategic attacks. The defensive plans of both superpowers were built, therefore, around the problem of stopping long-range bombers, and antiaircraft missiles were designed primarily with bombers in mind. Early surface-to-air missiles (like the Soviet-made SA-2) and air-to-air missiles (like the American-made Sidewinder) tended to be optimized for a specific mission: destroying big airplanes flying relatively straight-and-level courses at relatively high altitudes. Designers also assumed that the missiles would be stored and maintained at well-equipped, permanent airbases, and deployed only in the face of an imminent threat. These assumptions made the problem of designing a successful missile seem less difficult than it might have, and encouraged optimism on the part of both aerospace contractors and military customers. Firing tests, often designed to maximize the missile’s chances of success, reinforced the optimism.

Two early uses of antiaircraft missiles in the “real world” heightened expectations even further. On September 24, 1958, pilots from the Communist and Nationalist Chinese air forces met in the skies over the disputed islands of Quemoy and Matsu. The Communist pilots had numbers and experience on their side, but the Nationalist pilots had technology: brandnew, heat-seeking Sidewinder missiles mounted beneath the wings of their F-86 fighters. Nationalist pilots destroyed ten enemy aircraft in a matter of minutes, while losing none of their own. The Communists, startled by a weapon they could neither match nor evade, broke off the battle and ceded the airspace over Quemoy and Matsu to the Nationalists. Less than two years later, a single SA-2 surface-to-air missile knocked an American U-2 reconnaissance plane out of the sky over the Soviet city of Sverdlovsk. The plane crashed, the pilot ejected, and the Soviets triumphantly displayed both to a world that had just heard President Dwight Eisenhower categorically deny their existence. The loss of the plane and the capture of CIA-trained pilot Francis Gary Powers was a diplomatic black eye for the United States, but it was a revelation for military leaders interested in the problem of air defense. The U-2 was designed to fly so high that no antiaircraft weapon could touch it, but a surface-to-air missile had brought it down with ease (another SA-2 would destroy another U-2 in October 1962). If the new missiles could touch even the “untouchable” U-2, they could easily deal with the bigger, lower flying bombers.

Fueled by this optimism, both superpowers developed a wide range of antiaircraft missiles in the late 1950s and early 1960s: air-to-air as well as surface-to-air, radar-guided as well as heat-seeking. Just as important, they increased their reliance on guided missiles in air defense and aerial combat. The Soviet Union pioneered a new style of air defense that integrated guns, surface-to-air missiles, and radar installations into a centrally controlled network. Over the next two decades, they would export both the concept and the technology to their allies and client states: North Vietnam, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq among them. Both superpowers made air-to-air part of the standard missiles of their fighters’ armament, and the United States went further still: introducing fighters armed solely with missiles. The first missile-only fighter, the Air Force’s F-102 Delta Dagger, entered service in 1956. The Navy’s F-4 Phantom, later adopted by the Air Force as well, followed in 1961. Most American fighters of the period carried both missiles and cannon, but planners and pilots alike expected missiles to be their primary weapon. Why close to 2,000 feet or less (the maximum effective range for cannon) if you could fire from 3,000 feet (the minimum effective range for missiles) or more? The American preference for missile-armed airplanes reflected the American military’s faith in missiles’ effectiveness. Studies in the early 1960s confidently predicted that, in combat, the radarguided Sparrow would hit its target 65 percent of the time and the heatseeking Sidewinder would hit 71 percent of the time.

The Vietnam War put both superpowers’ missiles—and assumptions about them—to their first real test. North Vietnam’s air defenses in mid- 1964 consisted of three dozen jet fighters, 1,000 antiaircraft guns, a few radar stations, and no missiles at all. After the Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 1964, however, the Soviet Union began to supply missiles, launchers, and additional radar sets, as well as advisors, to oversee their construction and train their North Vietnamese crews. By the time Operation Rolling Thunder—U.S. air attacks on North Vietnam—began in March 1965, North Vietnam had a Soviet-style integrated network of missiles, guns, and radar with which to meet them. The United States, meanwhile, deployed large numbers of missile-armed fighters in combat for the first time: Navy F-4 Phantoms and F-8 Crusaders from aircraft carriers in the South China Sea, and Air Force F-4s from bases in Thailand. Soviet-built MiG-21s, deployed in early 1966, gave the North Vietnamese Air Force their own missile-armed fighters: each carried two AA-2 heat-seeking missiles (similar to the Sidewinder) in addition to cannon.

The air war over Vietnam lasted, with only a few brief pauses, from 1965 until 1973. It was the first full-scale war in which both sides had used missiles against aircraft, and the first sustained use of missiles in combat. On one hand, it confirmed what the Chinese dogfight of 1958 and the U-2 shoot-downs of 1960 and 1962 had suggested: missiles could be devastatingly effective against undefended airplanes flown by unaware pilots. On the other hand, however, it showed that neither condition was likely to persist in wartime. Both sides were at first caught unprepared by the missile threat, but both sides (the United States and Soviet-backed North Vietnam) quickly moved to prepare better defenses. Both sides, too, quickly learned the limitations of the other’s missiles. Tactics changed, new countermeasures entered service, and the combat effectiveness of missiles diminished.

American air-to-air missiles, in particular,were dogged by performance problems. Designed for use against high-flying, slow-moving bombers, they proved to be badly adapted for use against low-flying, highly maneuverable fighters. Both the Sidewinder’s infrared sensors and the Sparrow’s radar guidance system were prone to lose track of low-flying targets amid the “noise” of other heat sources and radar echoes from the ground. Both missiles were complicated to fire, neither could be fired within 3,000 feet of a target, and both had trouble following enemy fighters through tight turns. North Vietnamese pilots adapted their tactics to these shortcomings. When they spotted a missile (especially easy with the Sparrow, because of its prominent smoke trail), they turned sharply and dove for the treetops. Both missiles—the Sparrow in particular—also suffered from reliability problems. Tropical humidity and salt air damaged electronic circuitry, rough roads and carrier-deck landings jarred fragile systems into failure, and maintenance took place under less-than-ideal conditions with limited tools and supplies.

Prewar forecasts predicted two hits for every three air-to-air missiles fired.Wartime results, however, fell well short of that goal. Air Force pilots attempted to fire Sparrows sixteen times in April and May 1965; three failed to fire, and only one of the remaining thirteen hit its target—a 6 percent hit rate that improved only marginally by 1968. Navy crews fired twelve Sparrows in the same two-month period, achieving four hits for a 25 percent hit rate—a significant improvement on the Air Force’s record, but still well short of expectations. Six of twenty-one Sidewinders fired during April and May hit their targets (28 percent). One squadron commander, responding to his pilots’ frustration with missile performance in 1965, said: “Guys, they don’t call them hittles” (Michel 1997, 44). Incremental upgrades were made to both Sparrow and Sidewinder during the war, but they did little to improve performance. During the last years of direct U.S. involvement in Vietnam (1971–1973), the hit rate for both Sparrows and Sidewinders hovered just below 12 percent and that for the Falcon—a new heat-seeking missile ordered by the Air Force as a successor to the Sidewinder—around 16 percent (two hits in twelve launches). The Navy’s new “G” model of the Sidewinder was the only bright spot: its twenty-three hits in fifty firings gave it an astounding (for the time) hit rate of 46 percent.

The bomber crews and mission planners responsible for attacks on North Vietnam were, simultaneously, learning the weaknesses of North Vietnamese surface-to-air missiles (SAMs). The SA-2 was big—often compared to a flying telephone pole—and relatively unmaneuverable. Like the Sparrow and Sidewinder, it had been designed to destroy big, sluggish bombers at high altitude. American pilots adjusted their tactics to exploit these weaknesses, flying low on their runs to and from the target, and “popping up” at the last moment to release their bombs. Mission planners also made adjustments to deal with the SAM threat. Attack aircraft carried radar-jamming equipment along with bombs, and specialized radar-jamming aircraft accompanied raids. Specially equipped aircraft dubbed “Wild Weasels” led the raids, attacking enemy missiles sites with bombs, gunfire, and new types of radiation-seeking missiles that homed in on SAM sites’ targeting radar. A typical late-war mission, flown on May 10, 1972, consisted of thirty-two bombers escorted by twenty-eight fighters to defend against MiGs and twenty-seven escorts ( jammers and Wild Weasels) to defend against SAMs.

The arrival of Soviet-made SA-7s on the battlefield in 1972 forced American pilots and planners to change their tactics again. A lightweight, heat-seeking missile designed to be carried and fired by a single soldier, the SA-7 was effective where the SA-2 was not: at ranges under 2 miles and altitudes below 10,000 feet. Low-level attacks became far more dangerous and, as a result, far less common. Modern jets like the F-4 and the F-105 Thunderchief took to higher altitudes, trusting jamming equipment,Wild Weasel escorts, and their own maneuverability to keep them safe. Slower, less maneuverable aircraft like the aging, propeller-driven A-1 Skyraider were pulled off the battlefield. Helicopters, though extremely vulnerable to SA-7s (it took an average of 135 SA-7s to kill an F-4, and 10 even for an A-1, but only 1.8 for a helicopter) remained in service. They were too valuable to the U.S. war effort to consider withdrawing them.

The Vietnam War demonstrated both the power and the limitations of antiaircraft missiles. The Arab-Israeli war of 1973 reinforced those lessons. Egypt and Syria, whose air forces had been destroyed on the ground by Israeli air strikes at the start of the 1967 war, fortified strategic areas with belts of antiaircraft defenses—integrated networks of radar, missiles, and guns like those used by North Vietnam. Egypt, for example, deployed 150 SA-2 and SA-3 batteries, dozens of mobile SA-6 batteries, and thousands of guns and shoulder-fired SA-7s. Sixty batteries were allotted to the Suez Canal alone. The Israeli Air Force lost 115 aircraft (one-third of its prewar strength) in nineteen days of fighting, all but four to the Arab nations’ ground-based air defense networks.

Eight years of relative peace (1973–1982) followed the American withdrawal from Vietnam and the negotiated truce between Israel and its neighbors. Over those eight years, a new generation of missiles reached service. Deployed in a series of conflicts in the early 1980s, they showed that both antiaircraft missiles had reached a new level of sophistication.

On August 19, 1981, a pair of Libyan combat aircraft threatened elements of the U.S. Navy’s Sixth Fleet operating in international waters off the coast of Libya. A pair of F-14 Tomcat fighters from the aircraft carrier Nimitz quickly destroyed both Libyan intruders, using upgraded versions of the once-troubled Sparrow. An upgraded version of the Sidewinder served the British well in their war with Argentina the following year: of twentysix missiles fired in twenty-three engagements, roughly 90 percent hit their targets. Estimates of Argentine losses to Sidewinders varied from sixteen to twenty aircraft, but even the lowest of those figures gave the Sidewinder a kill ratio of 61 percent—five times the U.S. average in Vietnam a decade earlier. Israel’s 1982 attacks on guerilla bases inside Syria produced similar results: eighty-four Soviet-built Syrian fighters destroyed with Sparrow and Sidewinder missiles, including sixty-four in the first two days of fighting alone. The “one shot, one kill” dreams of 1950s missile designers had become reality, and missiles had displaced guns as the dominant weapon in aerial combat.

Antiaircraft missiles fired from the ground also achieved fresh successes in the 1980s, notably during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan (1979– 1989). Agents of the Central Intelligence Agency supplied hundreds of U.S.-made Stinger missiles to Afghan guerillas beginning in mid-1986. The Stinger, a shoulder-fired, heat-seeking weapon with a range of 3–5 miles, inflicted devastating losses on low-flying Soviet aircraft—especially the heavily armed helicopter gunships that had been the Soviets’ most potent weapon. Soviet commanders pulled the helicopters back to higher altitudes in response, reducing their vulnerability but also their effectiveness. The potent, portable Stinger fitted perfectly with the guerillas’ hit-and-run strategy, and the losses it inflicted reinforced the Soviet government’s decision to withdraw.

The assumption that only a tank could destroy a tank was undermined, in World War II, by the introduction of antitank artillery (like Germany’s versatile 88-millimeter cannon), mines, hand-carried “satchel charges” of high explosive, and unguided rockets like the American bazooka. All three types of weapon offered some defense against armored attacks, but each had drawbacks. Artillery had to be sited, and mines sown, in advance; they were effective in defense of fixed points, but less so in dealing with unexpected breakthroughs by enemy tanks. Satchel charges and unguided rockets could be used without extensive preparation, but only at close range and without any guarantee of lethal damage to the target. Antitank missiles, pioneered by French designers in the mid-1950s, combined the portability and flexibility of rocket launchers with the accuracy and hitting power of artillery. Carried by small teams of soldiers or mounted on wheeled vehicles, they allowed Cold War–era infantry to engage enemy tanks on something like equal terms.

Technologically, antitank missiles were less complex than antiaircraft or antiship missiles. Unlike aircraft, tanks are slow-moving targets capable of maneuvering in only two dimensions. Unlike ships, they have no means of detecting incoming missiles and no defensive weapons to use against them. Missile designers assumed that most antitank missiles would be fired at relatively close range by operators who could follow their progress and could adjust their course as needed. Effective guidance for antitank missiles was, therefore, a relatively straightforward problem: one solved initially with optical guidance systems and later with infrared, laser, and wire-guidance systems. The French SS-11, introduced in the late 1950s, automated the process of adjusting the missile’s course. The operator kept the launcher’s sights centered on the target, and the guidance system adjusted the missile’s course as needed. Warhead design was also straightforward, since missile designers could easily adapt armor-piercing techniques developed for artillery shells.

Antitank missiles became a dependable, effective weapon more quickly than antiaircraft or antiship missiles. As a result, they were the first class of tactical missile to have a significant impact in combat. Israeli forces used French SS-10s to destroy Egyptian tanks in the Sinai Desert during the 1956 Arab-Israeli war, and two years later Britain’s secretary of state for war announced that a new missile then in development would “remove the heavy tank from the battlefield” (Gunston 1993, 248). The prediction was premature, but the United States, the Soviet Union, and their European allies invested heavily in antitank missiles during the 1960s and early 1970s, preparing for the massive tank battles that were expected to take place on the plains of central Europe if a U.S.-USSR war broke out. Antitank missiles also continued to play roles in smaller wars outside Europe. Both Arab and Israeli forces used them in the Six-Day War of 1967, and North Vietnamese forces used Soviet-made AT-3s against American tanks during their spring 1972 invasion of South Vietnam.

It was the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, however, that established antitank missiles as a major force in armored warfare. The missiles had, by 1973, achieved “one shot, one kill” capability, and both sides used them with devastating effect. Israeli forces armed primarily with American-made TOW (tube-fired, optically tracked, wire-guided) missiles destroyed 1,270 Egyptian and Syrian tanks—more than a third of the two nations’ combined tank forces. In the Sinai Desert, however, Egyptian forces enjoyed even greater success. Israel had deployed 290 tanks to the Sinai, the southern theater of a two-front war; Egyptian troops armed with Soviet AT-3s and rocketpropelled grenades destroyed 180 of them—a staggering 62 percent. Observers on both sides of the war concluded that missiles, not other tanks, were now the most potent threat to armored forces. The world’s major armies adjusted their plans accordingly in the late 1970s and 1980s— searching for ways to make their antitank missiles more deadly and their tanks less vulnerable.

The crude antiship missiles used in World War II evolved steadily in subsequent decades, acquiring more efficient motors, more accurate systems, and more powerful warheads. Warship designers countered with improved defensive measures, but few of these systems—offensive or defensive—were ever tested in combat. The armed conflicts of the Cold War took place almost exclusively on (and over) land, and rarely involved two powers capable of challenging one another for control of the sea. The 1982 war between Britain and Argentina over the Falkland Islands was an exception. British forces, operating thousands of miles from home in the remote South Atlantic, depended on ships for transportation, supply, and (most critically) air support. Without their fleet of transports, aircraft carriers, and escorts, the British could not hope to retake the islands from occupying Argentine forces. Argentine air force commanders, well aware of this fact, placed British ships high on their list of desirable targets. British naval commanders, equally well aware of it, deployed their forces with extreme caution. They refused, for example, to send their carrier battle groups into the waters between the Falklands and the Argentine mainland—reducing their effectiveness, but also reducing the chances that one of the vital carriers would be lost.

Both sides used antiship missiles in the Falklands War, and both sides were stunned by their power. On May 3, 1982, helicopters launched from the decks of British destroyers used Sea Skua missiles to attack a pair of 700-ton Argentine patrol boats. Within minutes, the Commodoro Somellera was sinking and the Alferez Sobral badly damaged and afire. The leader of the attack, Lt. Commander Alan Rich, returned to his ship “shaking uncontrollably, overwhelmed by the destructive power he had unleashed” (Hastings and Jenkins 1984, 151). A day later, Argentine pilots exacted revenge: a French-made Exocet missile, fired at close range and wave-top height, slammed into the side of the British destroyer Sheffield. The missile tore a 10-by-4-foot hole in the hull, set the ship afire, destroyed the water main, and knocked out electrical power. Twenty-one men died as a result of the attack, and the surviving crew, deprived of any means of fighting the fire, were forced to abandon the ship. Sheffield, fires finally burnt out, was taken under tow five days after the attack, but sank before it could reach a friendly port. “Everybody had always said that modern warships are ‘onehit ships,’ ” Sheffield’s captain observed after the attack. “Nobody had thought about the implications of a ‘one-hit ship’ 8,000 miles from home. It’s much worse than a car crash—you lose everything” (Hastings and Jenkins 1984, 155).

Two weeks later, on May 25, another Exocet struck the cargo ship Atlantic Conveyor—killing twelve sailors and sending it to the bottom along with nearly all its cargo. The cargo lost included thirteen of the fourteen helicopters aboard, and all the tents for the invasion force. It was a major strategic setback, but it could—British commanders soberly reflected— have been even worse. Losing the Atlantic Conveyor simply delayed the invasion; losing one of the fleet’s two aircraft carriers would have forced a complete withdrawal. The carriers were pulled back even further.

The “tanker war” that raged in the Persian Gulf in 1984–1987 confirmed the destructive power of antiship missiles. Part of a larger, decadelong conflict between Iran and Iraq, it resulted from each country’s desire to cut off the other’s oil exports and so strangle its economy. The tanker war included 286 recorded missile attacks, most executed by Iraqis armed with French-made Exocets. More than 100 ships suffered significant damage, and eighty were sunk, scuttled, or written off as total losses. The U.S. Navy frigate Stark was one prominent victim of the tanker war. Hit by two Iraqi Exocets while escorting tankers through the Gulf in May 1987, it sustained serious fire and blast damage and suffered thirty-seven dead, but was able to reach the friendly port of Bahrain under her own power. The attack on the Stark, which had failed to detect the incoming missiles until a split second before impact, heightened tensions aboard U.S. naval vessels in the Gulf. A year later, in July 1988, the cruiser USS Vincennes fired two missiles at an unidentified aircraft whose course changes and radio silence suggested that it was preparing another attack. The aircraft—which one of the missiles hit and destroyed—was in fact an Iranian airliner with 290 civilians aboard.

The Falklands War and Iran-Iraq wars left a deep impression on naval officers. The advent of missiles costing hundreds of thousands of dollars that could sink ships costing tens of millions led, beginning in the mid- 1980s, to steadily more sophisticated shipboard defenses.Warship designers upgraded chaff dispensers1 (British ships in the Falklands had carried only seven rounds of chaff apiece), and added automated gun and missile systems to destroy incoming missiles at close range. The Vincennes was, ironically, the first of a new class of American “air defense cruisers” designed to defend an entire battle group by engaging up to 200 missiles at once. Designers also began, in the late 1990s, to use “stealth technology”—using new shapes and materials to make ships less visible to radar. How effective these measures will be against a new generation of antiship missiles remains to be seen. Large-scale naval combat has, since 1991, become a rarity again.

Tactical missiles vary widely in size, weight, proportions, launch platform, and method of guidance. They are manufactured in a dozen different countries, and designed for a wide variety of missions. Even so, they have many features in common. Nearly all, for example, have the same structure: a metal tube, fitted with stubby fins for steering and stability, which contains a rocket motor, a guidance system, and a warhead. The motor nearly always uses solid fuel, for reliability and ease of storage. The warhead, likewise, is nearly always conventional rather than nuclear. A typical missile’s fins are partly or wholly movable. Like the control surfaces on an airplane (rudder, elevators, and ailerons), they alter the machine’s course by altering the flow of air around it. The control surfaces in a modern, high-performance airplane move in response to electrical signals carried by wires from the cockpit, where they are generated by the pilot’s movement of the controls. The control surfaces in a tactical missile move in response to electrical signals from the guidance system. Missiles, in other words, were using “fly-by-wire” control systems long before such systems became standard in airplanes.

The basic function of a tactical missile’s guidance system is to translate input about the relative positions of the (moving) missile and its (probably moving) target into output that will move the missile’s control surfaces just enough to keep it on target. The source of the guidance system’s input varies widely from missile to missile.Wire-guided missiles, for example, remain connected to their launchers by thin wires as fine as a human hair that unreel behind them and carry inputs from the operator. Radio-guided missiles substituted a wireless link for a wire one, but still required the operator to maintain control. Heat-seeking missiles, on the other hand, use onboard infrared sensors to lock onto and follow the heat generated by the target. Laser- and radar-guided missiles locate and follow their targets using energy (light beams and radio waves, respectively) bounced off the target’s surface. Each type of guidance system has both benefits and disadvantages. Radar-
guided missiles, for example, can be used in all weather conditions and fired from beyond visual range, but are complex and vulnerable to electronic jamming that disrupts their radar. Heat-seeking missiles are less complex and more reliable, but they can only lock onto their targets at relatively close ranges, and can be lured away from the target by flares and other intense heat sources. Wire-guided missiles are virtually immune to such “spoofing” but oblige the user to remain within visual range of the target until they hit.

Improvements in guidance-system technology gradually improved missiles’ performance as the Cold War went on. Early heat-seeking missiles could only “see” and lock onto intense heat sources like jet exhaust pipes and so could only be fired from behind a target aircraft. Later versions, with more sophisticated infrared sensors, could lock onto the friction-heated air streaming back from a target aircraft’s nose, and so could be fired from any angle. Early radar-guided missiles depended on an external radar set (part of the aircraft or ground installation firing the missile) to “paint” the target with its signals—often a difficult requirement to fulfill in the chaos of battle. Later versions carried their own radar sets, which allowed them to be used (as heat-seekers had always been) as “fire and forget” weapons. A further improvement supplemented the missile’s onboard radar with an inertial guidance system like that used on ballistic missiles. The dual guidance system allowed the missile’s radar to be used in brief bursts at critical moments, making enemy jamming more difficult.

Other missile components also evolved, though less extensively, during the Cold War era. “Hot launching,” in which the missile’s own exhaust sets it in motion, was gradually supplemented by “cold launching,” in which a charge of compressed gas (or some other nondestructive mechanism) throws the missile from its launcher before the engine starts. Cold-launch systems allowed missiles to be fired from the decks of ships, the tops of armored vehicles, and the shoulders of infantrymen in confined spaces— anywhere the hot gasses of missile exhaust would cause damage or injury. Missile warheads, originally simple charges of high explosive, also evolved into specialized forms designed for specific types of targets. Armor-piercing warheads carried specially shaped explosive charges designed to focus the force of their explosion inward. Antiaircraft warheads were designed to spray clouds of metal shrapnel through the fragile engines and fuel tanks of their targets. The United States even developed an antiaircraft missile—the Genie—with a nuclear warhead. Designed for use against Soviet bomber formations in the event of an attack on the United States, it was intended to destroy or damage many aircraft in a single blow.

The technological diversity of tactical missiles is much greater than this brief discussion suggests. The range of roles in which they have been used is also broad. Tactical missiles are, by convention, divided into four categories according to where they are launched and where they hit: air-to-air, air-to-surface, surface-to-air, and surface-to-surface. In tracing tactical missiles’ impact on warfare, however, it is convenient to blur those distinctions and focus instead on the principal types of targets at which they were aimed.

The basic goal of warfare has not changed since the days that Homer wrote about in the Iliad: inflict enough damage on the enemy’s troops to achieve your goal, while exposing your own troops to the least possible risk. The evolution of military technology reflects those goals.Weapons have grown steadily more powerful and accurate (which makes them more efficient) and steadily more able to strike at a distance (which makes their users less vulnerable). Most advances in military technology are small, incremental changes that have only a modest impact on strategy and tactics. Occasionally, however, a new type of weapon transforms both. The airplane (which added a third dimension to the battlefield) was one such weapon. The tank (which combined the mobility of cavalry and the destructive power of artillery) was another. The tactical guided missile was a third.

Even the earliest tactical missiles offered a powerful combination of attributes: destructive power, portability, and relatively low cost. Their destructive power made aircraft, ships, and tanks—the basic tools of mid twentieth- century warfare—more vulnerable than ever before. Their portability and low cost allowed them to quickly spread beyond the boundaries of the industrialized nations that built them. The United States and the Soviet Union, arming their allies against one another, shipped huge quantities of their missiles abroad. Missiles also became important in the international arms trade, with France (for example) supplying its Exocet antiship missile to the air forces of Argentina, Iraq, and other countries. Tactical missiles had, by the time the Cold War ended in 1990, spread to every nation where political tensions led (or threatened to lead) to military action: Taiwan, Korea,Vietnam, Israel, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and so on. When war did break out in those areas, it was shaped by the widespread presence of the missiles. Nations that used them effectively (Egypt and Syria in 1973, Israel in 1982) enjoyed a great advantage over nations that did not. Even the United States (in Vietnam) and the Soviet Union (in Afghanistan) found themselves put on the defensive by enemies that had mastered the use of tactical missiles.

Tactical missiles transformed the battlefields of the Cold War era because of the threat they posed to expensive, powerful military “assets” like planes, ships, and armored vehicles. The simple fact that the missiles existed—that they might be used—forced the commanders who controlled those assets to deploy them more carefully. Ships approached enemy shorelines less frequently, and treated every unidentified aircraft as a potentially lethal threat. Bombers and attack aircraft flew high to avoid the threat of missiles, sacrificing surprise and accuracy in order to avoid crippling losses. Armored vehicles moved more cautiously, wary of opportunistic missile attacks by enemy infantry and aircraft. Commanders advancing boldly into enemy territory risked disaster if the enemy’s missiles were not neutralized first—either by preemptive attacks or by defensive measures like flares, chaff, jamming, or evasive maneuvers.

Defensive measures grew steadily more sophisticated and effective as the Cold War went on. So, not surprisingly, did the missiles themselves. Warheads became more powerful, guidance systems more capable, and missiles as systems more reliable. The threat of enemy missiles could thus be reduced, but never eliminated. Effectively using (and defending against) missiles had, by 1990, become as important to military success as controlling the high ground.

In the tenth and eleventh centuries, the period of their greatest power, the Byzantine horsemen were the best paid and best equipped and organized military force of their time.

During the rule of Emperor Nicephoros II (963-9), Byzantium, free from the Bulgar threat, undertook military enterprises in Asia Minor. Cyprus and Syria were conquered, and the Arabs taken on in Palestine. The state treasury grew richer. Nicephoros formed units modelled on the late Roman heavy cavalry (clibanarii) and the extra-heavy (klibanophoroi). This name derived from the klibanion, a corselet used by the Byzantine riders; its name in turn came from the Latin clibanarius (heavily armoured horseman). Because their equipment was very expensive, the klibanophoroi probably only existed in the guard (tagmata).

On the battlefield, the klibanophoroi used a wedge formation, with 20 men in the first line, 24 in the second, and four more in each following line. The last, twelfth, line had 64 men, and the whole unit 504. A formation more frequently used had 10 lines and 384 men. Approximately every fourth and fifth man was armed with a bow instead of a lance, and positioned slightly to the rear inside the wedge. There were probably three units of klibanophoroi in the tagmata, totalling between 1,000 and 1,500 men. Every unit bore its own pennant on lances, and had vestments of a distinctive colour.

The klibanophoroi were armed with a lance (kontos), about 4 m/13 ft long, which had been adopted from the Sarmatians and Alans, and a sword (spathion, from the Latin spatha) with a 90 cm/35 in blade. The first four ranks of klibanophoroi also carried several short darts (marzabarboulon) in a leather case hanging from the saddle. Byzantine cavalry used three basic types of protection: mail, scale and lamellar armour, the last being the most often used. The lamellae were mostly of iron, although leather and horn were used too. Riders also wore a wide-skirted, knee-length topcoat with short sleeves (epilorikion), made of padded and quilted cotton, leather and felt, at least 2 cm/1 in thick and worn over the corselet. The lower parts of the legs were protected by iron graves (podopsella), and the forearms with splint armour vambraces (chiropsella). Horse-armour was made of horn or iron lamellae or mail, but multi-layered felt covering is also mentioned. Headgear was of the same materials, and metal chamfrons were possibly used as well.

After defeat at the hands of the Saljuqs at Manzikert, in 1071, the klibanophoroi ceased to exist.

US 2.5″ Hale rocket

US Civil War Hale rocket launcher

A typical early Congreve rocket, showing the attachment of the guide stick. The casing for the warhead (A) and rocket body (B) was made of iron. When the rocket was assembled for use, the stick (D) would be slid through three soft iron bands (C), which were then crimped tightly around it with special pincers. Congreve rockets made for the British army, like the one shown here, used guide sticks that were divided into 4-foot sections for ease of transport, and then assembled in the field using soft iron ferrules (E) to join the sections.

Black powder rockets were used sporadically on the battlefields of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Where they were used, however, they tended to be used in large numbers—possibly as a way of magnifying their psychological effect and getting around their lack of accuracy. The Chinese text Wu Pei Chih, written in the 1620s, describes rockets with explosive warheads being fired from wooden boxes divided into cells and capable of holding 100 projectiles each. The rulers of the kingdom of Mysore, in southern India, began to equip their armies with rockets in the 1750s. Haider Ali and his son and successor, Tippoo Sahib, ultimately attached a company of rocketeers to each of their army’s brigades—a total of 5,000 rocket-carrying troops by the 1790s. Their rockets, built in two standardized sizes, had tubes of cast iron rather than the then-standard bamboo or pasteboard. The use of iron added weight but also lent strength, allowing designers to make the rockets more powerful without fear that the added pressure from the expanding exhaust gasses would burst them. The extra thrust that iron tubes allowed more than compensated for the extra weight. According to Indian sources, Tippoo Sahib’s rocket troops could bombard targets as much as a mile and a half away.

The military value of Indian rockets became apparent when Haider Ali and Tippoo Sahib led their troops into battle against the British army in the 1780s and 1790s. Haider Ali’s victory at the Battle of Pollilur (1780), during the Second Mysore War, was due in part to rockets setting a British ammunition wagon afire. Tippoo Sahib, who ascended to the throne when his father was killed in 1782, made effective use of rockets again in his attack on the city of Travancore, which started the Third Mysore War in 1790. The final act of the Fourth Mysore War was played out in 1799 when British troops cornered Tippoo Sahib in his capital city, Seringapatam. A British force under Colonel Arthur Wellesley (later the Duke of Wellington) approached the city, but turned and fled when the Mysoreans unleashed a rocket barrage and a hail of musket fire. Ultimately, however, the British regrouped and brought their artillery to bear on the city walls. An early, lucky shot touched off a storeroom filled with rockets, and the resulting explosion opened a breach in the wall that later shots expanded. The British charged, and Tippoo Sahib died, ironically, fighting to hold a gap in his walls accidentally made by his own secret weapon.

Tippoo Sahib’s secret weapon did not remain secret for long. Word of his success with rockets reached Europe while the Mysore Wars were still going on, spurring research on military rockets in England, France, Ireland, and elsewhere. After the capture of Seringapatam and the death of Tippoo Sahib, the British shipped hundreds of rockets home to the Royal Arsenal as spoils of war. The point of the shipment was less to equip British troops with Indian rockets than to “reverse engineer” them: take them apart, study how they were made, and learn how to build rockets that were as good or better.

The comptroller of the Royal Arsenal was an old soldier named William Congreve who was also a senior officer in the Royal Artillery. His oldest son, also William, was twenty-seven when Tippoo Sahib died—a recent graduate of the University of Cambridge who practiced law, edited newspapers, and lived the high life among wealthy and titled friends in London. The younger Congreve had connections to the Royal Arsenal through his father and connections to some of the most powerful men in Britain through his friends. He also had a deep fascination with machines, and in mid-1804 he gave up both publishing and the law to pursue it. Congreve eventually received patents for things ranging from steam engines and canal locks to a new printing technique that made paper money more difficult to counterfeit. His first project, however, was to devise a weapon that could destroy the fleet of troop-carrying barges that Napoleon was assembling along the coast of France in preparation for an invasion of England. Congreve began with captured Indian war rockets and, improving on them, single-handedly brought on a revolution in rocket design.

Congreve’s revolution was part of the larger Industrial Revolution that was transforming Britain in the early nineteenth century. One of the central elements of the Industrial Revolution was the standardization and mechanization of manufacturing. Products that had been made one at a time by individual workers in separate workshops were increasingly mass-produced in centralized factories. Workers who once shaped raw materials directly, using hand tools and muscle power, increasingly tended steam powered machine tools that shaped the materials for them. Factory-made products were cheaper and more abundant than the workshop-made products that they replaced, and they were also more uniform. Even the most skilled and attentive hand worker turned out products that varied slightly from one another. A well-tended machine would, in contrast, always cut a strip of fabric to the same width, plane a block of wood to the same thickness, or bore a hole to the same depth. Congreve applied this principle to rocket design. To be truly effective weapons, he concluded, rockets had to be rigidly standardized.

Congreve made three critical innovations in rocket design. The first, borrowed straight from the rocketeers of Mysore, was to use metal rather than pasteboard (or any other organic material) for the tube. The second was to use a mass-produced black powder mixed according to a standardized formula and prepared with mechanical grinding mills that produced particles of uniform size. The third was to use a device like a small pile driver—a heavy weight, lifted by ropes and pulleys and then dropped—to pack the powder into the tube. Congreve’s machine-ground powder burned more smoothly than the hand-ground powders it replaced, and mechanical packing eliminated the empty or loosely packed pockets that hand packing sometimes left. His rockets developed a consistently high thrust, and their metal bodies ensured that they could withstand the increased gas pressures that produced it.

Congreve rockets thus offered not only better performance than earlier types, but more consistent performance as well. Access to the firing ranges of the Royal Arsenal allowed him to conduct extensive tests, which led to further fine tuning of both rockets and their launching apparatus. He was thus able, in 1805, to offer the Royal Army and Navy what would now be called a “weapon system”: an array of rockets in various sizes, each with an appropriate launching apparatus and most with a choice of explosive or incendiary warheads.

British cannon were named, in the early nineteenth century, for the weight of the iron balls that they fired: a “9-pounder” was a relatively small gun, a “32-pounder” a relatively large one. Congreve rockets were also designated as “___-pounders,” but in their case the weight was that of the largest lead ball that would fit inside the rocket tube. Those in active use ranged from 6-, 9-, 12-, and 18-pounder “light” rockets through 24- and 32-pounder “medium” rockets to 42-pounder “heavy” rockets. Tiny 3- pounders and massive 100- and 300-pounders were also developed, but the former was too small to do significant damage and the latter were too cumbersome to handle in the field.

British forces first used Congreve rockets in battle in 1805, and continued to use them throughout the wars against the French (1805–1812, 1815) and the Americans (1812–1814). A massive barrage of Congreve rockets— as many as 25,000 according to some accounts—set the city of Copenhagen, Denmark, afire in 1807, and the 150-man Royal Artillery Rocket Brigade played a critical role at the battle of Leipzig in 1813. Led by Captain Richard Bogue, it laid down a barrage that caused 2,500 French troops to break ranks and flee at a decisive moment. British rockets were also decisive at the 1814 Battle of Bladensburg in the War of 1812, which set the stage for their capture and burning of the city of Washington.

The most famous use of rockets in this war, which the British called the “Second American War,” was, ironically, a failure. For nearly twenty-four hours on September 12–13, 1814, British ships anchored off Baltimore bombarded Fort McHenry with cannon and 32-pounder Congreves in an effort to force its surrender. The fort survived, but Francis Scott Key— an American envoy being held temporarily on one of the British ships— immortalized “the rockets’ red glare” in his poem “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

The use of Congreve rockets eventually spread well beyond Britain. They were, by the middle of the nineteenth century, in the arsenals of every major European power as well as the arsenals of the United States and a number of Middle Eastern and Latin American nations. The reasons for this wide popularity are easy to understand. Congreve rockets were a new kind of artillery that were, in many ways, superior to cannon.

Even a “light” 12-pounder Congreve had a range of a 1.25 miles— double that of contemporary light artillery. A 32-pounder could, at a range of nearly 2 miles, punch through the walls of buildings or penetrate 9 feet of earth. Rockets generated no recoil (the force that slams a cannon back when it is fired), and so could be launched from lightweight wooden frames. The frames for light rockets could be carried by individual soldiers or mounted in small oared boats; those for heavy rockets could be mounted on horse-drawn wagons and the decks of modest-sized ships. Reloading the muzzle-loading cannons used in the early nineteenth century was a complex, multistep process. Reloading a rocket frame involved little more than lifting a new rocket into position. Trained rocketeers could, as a result, fire four rounds in a minute—a pace that even the best gun crews could not match. Freed of the need to move a heavy bronze or iron cannon and its carriage, rocketeers were also more mobile than traditional artillery units. A hundred men on foot could hand-carry 10 frames and 300 light rockets to the front lines and discharge all 300 rockets in less than 10 minutes. Four horses—barely enough to pull a medium-sized cannon—could carry 4 frames and 72 rounds on their backs. Rocket troops could move fast and hit hard, a combination that endeared them to forward-looking army and navy officers alike.

For all their advantages, the Congreve rockets had drawbacks. The most important was a well-deserved reputation for erratic flight, which sometimes made them wildly inaccurate. Part of the accuracy problem was the rocket’s center of gravity, which shifted steadily forward as the fuel burned away. Part of it was the shape of the rocket body and the position of the exhaust nozzles, which were seldom perfectly symmetrical. The largest part of the problem, however, was the stick. Like the Indian rockets on which they were based (and virtually all other rockets that came before them), Congreve rockets used a long wooden guide stick to keep them stable in flight. The stick, up to 15 feet long in heavy rockets, made Congreve’s weapons cumbersome to handle and vulnerable to air currents while in flight. It also, because it was mounted off-center, tended to throw the rocket off course even when the air was still. Congreve reduced the balance problem in 1815 by mounting the stick in the center of the rocket’s base plate and directing the exhaust through a ring of small nozzles around the edge of the plate. Even when centered, however, the stick was never perfectly centered, perfectly stiff, or perfectly straight, and the rockets continued to have a reputation for erratic flight.

William Hale introduced an improved version of Congreve’s rocket around 1840. Like Congreve’s later designs, it used multiple exhaust vents evenly spaced around the circular base plate. Unlike any previous rocket, however, it used small metal vanes to deflect the exhaust gasses and cause the rocket to spin around its long axis like a rifle bullet. Hale spun his rocket in order to stabilize it: the spinning evened out the effects of not-quite-symmetrical rocket tubes and shifting centers of gravity. Most important, the spinning eliminated the need for a guide stick, which made Hale’s rockets more portable, as well as more accurate, than Congreve’s.

The British armed forces, though at war in China, Afghanistan, and elsewhere in the 1840s, did not immediately adopt Hale’s improved rocket. They clung to the familiar Congreve, as they had clung to the long serving “Brown Bess” musket, long after newer and better weapons became available. Unable to drum up interest in his native country, Hale sold the manufacturing rights to his rocket to the United States for $20,000— a substantial sum now, and an immense one then. The first troops to use the Hale rocket in combat were, therefore, the American expeditionary force dispatched to Veracruz in 1847, during the Mexican-American War. Union and Confederate forces both made occasional use of rockets (both Congreve and Hale types) during the American Civil War. The Russian, Italian, Hungarian, and Austrian armies all acquired and used Hale rockets in the 1850s and 1860s, and the British officially adopted them in 1867. Having made the transition, the British military proceeded to cling to the Hale as fiercely as it had to the Congreve. Hale rockets remained in active service until 1899 (well after it, too, had been rendered obsolete) and was not formally stricken from the Royal Army’s inventory until 1919.

Britain’s long use of Hale rockets was not solely a result of inertia. The wars that Britain fought in the last third of the nineteenth century were small, localized conflicts with native troops in Africa and South Asia. Hale rockets could still be effective against enemies armed with muskets and smoothbore cannon, and they could be carried by pack animals into places that no wheeled gun carriage could reach. On the battlefields of Europe, however, the day of the black powder rocket was essentially over by 1870.

Congreve’s rockets had caused a sensation in the first decade of the 1800s because they offered significant advantages over traditional gun artillery. By 1870, however, the situation had been reversed. A series of midcentury breakthroughs in cannon design meant that the best gun artillery had greater range, greater accuracy, and more striking power than the best rocket artillery. Rockets could still be fired faster than cannon, but the gap closed significantly as muzzle-loaded cannon firing balls gave way to breech-loaded cannon firing shells. High-velocity shells even mimicked the high-pitched shrieking noise that made rockets unnerving to the soldiers they were fired at. Rockets played little or no role, therefore, in the turn-of-the-century conflicts that signaled the emergence of modern warfare: the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), the Spanish-American War (1899), the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1901), and the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905). As a weapon, the black powder rocket was dead.

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