ajay_ijn said:
......................one source says that US did not aquire Sunburn from Russia becoz of High cost but tried to aquire Kh-31 Krypton which is also a supersonic Anti-ship Missile.Actually it is a secret deal so not much is known about it.
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=20589
Bollocks. It is common knowledge and is certainly not a "secret". I have discussed the Kh-31 deal on this forum (and about 4 others) ad nauseum.
Boeing had a commercial arrangement in 1999 to buy 50 Kh-31's as part of a US bid to design an AShM training missile. These missiles were originally going to replace the Sea Snake and Vandals that the USN uses to simulate supersonic cruise missiles.
Boeing established that the missiles were inadequate to perform the role, they had to modify the guidance systems, increase the range and make modifications to them so as to simulate other likely missile targets. The programme was dropped as the missile was seen as a failing exercise in development. It was rated as unsuitable for further development.
There is still substantial anger over how this deal transpire and there is ample documentation that was provided under US Senate Hearings about the fact that the USAF/Boeing fixed some fundamental missile behaiour issues and then passed that knowledge back to the Russians as an issue of "goodwill". This was in a period when the US and USSR had collaborated on a number of projects - but some said that as the US had modified the missile to perform properly, that those changes should not have been passed on. Clinton is heavily crticised for his role over this (he sanctioned the transfers as part of a process to further russian relations)
Although I loathe conspiracy theories and rumours with a passion, there are persistent comments that the USN has already acquired a Sunburn for development and testing.
The worldnetdaily article is a classical example of how the media promotes rubbish as fact and with a bit of proper research, they could have acquired a copy of the Senate Hearings documents for themselves which would have shown how idiotic their article and claims were. Not only is the worldnetdaily guilty of bad journalism, they are fundamentally guilty of misrepresentation and journalistic indolence.
As a legacy of Boeings reccomendation about the unsuitability of the Kh-31, the USN has reverted to using Sea Snakes and Vandals as supersonic cruise missile targets. A new system is currently under development.
It might be pertinent to remind everyone that the USN has been training against supersonic cruise missiles since the 70's and actually developed the first supersonic AShM in approx 1959 - so it's not as if they were oblivious of the capability threat - hence their development of the Vandal series to counter Russian systems since the 1970's.
A search of this forum will generate my comments about the Kh-31 over the last 18 months. I'm not however going to retype all my comments and resubmit links which were made available all that time ago.
