[QUOTE="Didact, post: 6608294, member: 156751"]The weapon effectiveness is contingent on nature of target and the nature of air defense assets to be encountered en route, in addition to it's own characteristics. As such, sweeping statements for or against one platform is meaningless.
It is NOT a flawed logic,for you yourself state what i was saying in my previous comments in a different manner- to take out a ship with all the SAMs and CIWS you would need a faster weapon that renders excruciatingly small time window to the defence systems to react~ hence a supersonic brahmos is ideally more suitable in this case (and even better than various subsonic AShMs available)
But to engage a static land target at longer ranges a subsonic missile like nirbhay is more suitable vis-a-vis brahmos(simply because of being lighter,longer range~resulting in higher stand off margins,tercom guidance(something that brahmos lacks) . For if that wasnt true US with all the resources and money in the world wouldnt be "heavily relying" on subsonic tomhawks to take out land targets deep within the enemy territory[/QUOTE]
Again, incorrect.
You are using very specific situations to make generalized statements. That by itself would be enough to act as a dis-qualifier for your statement.
For the Naval role,
speed by itself will not be the only, nor the primary factor in determining available reaction time for the target vessel. A BrahMos AShM flying at 2.8M at 30,000 ft would be in the line-of-sight of a radar right after launch (LOS of radar at 10m altitude for the missile at 30K ft. = 368 km)
A Harpoon or Klub (sub sonic AShMs) flying at 50 ft. at 0.7-0.8M will only break into the LOS of a ship mounted radar at around 30-40 Km away from the ship.
You can do the math and find out which missile will be detected first, i.e. allow a longer reaction time for the target vessel.
This is one of the reasons why Western Navies still persist with Sub sonic AShMs. This is also one of the reasons why very few AShMs with very long ranges even exist, and also why these AShMs generally have a super sonic terminl speed. The trade off with increased speed versus higher visibility not being worth the payoff in their opinion.
There is also a counter view to these points I've made, and they are equally convincing to this writer. It is precisely due the myriad of complexities that one needs to very careful while making sweeping statements.
I hope I've made myself clear.
And yeah,
land is just another generalization, and meaningless in the current context. Land manifests itself as a mesh of infinite terrains/contours. And as such, terrain itself becomes a very important parameter, unlike in the case of sea strike missiles. In short, it's even more difficult.