What Russia will do with the U.S. cruise missiles recovered intact from the West’s April attack on Syria

Following a large scale joint cruise missile strike by the United States, France and Britain in mid April against Syrian government and military facilities, a number of missiles reportedly failed to explode and landed harmlessly in the Syrian desert. The Syrian military reported recovering these missiles days later, which were sent to Russia for study and evaluation. The missiles included Tomahawk cruise missiles, the mainstay of the U.S. Navy’s strike capabilities, and according to some reports the new JASSM air launched missiles with advanced stealth capabilities were also acquired. The opportunity to study these missiles relatively intact has been hailed as a valuable opportunity for Russia’s own defence industries - both to more effectively develop countermeasures and potentially even to reverse engineer American missile technologies for the development of its own cruise missiles.

A month after the strike, Russian sources have reported that the country is set to develop new electronic warfare platforms based on the information gained from analysing the recently acquired American cruise missiles…

Retired Colonel Mikhail Khodarenok described the acquisition of U.S. made cruise missiles through Syria as “a textbook (example) on materials science, a textbook (example) on technologies falling from the skies.” He noted that the missiles would be a considerable asset to Russia’s development of defensive electronic warfare capacities, stating: ” this is a real gift for those structures of the Russian defence industry engaged in organising jamming; it will become clear how to disable the Tomahawk’s communications system during combat operations.” While the Tomahawk’s producer Raytheon is almost certain to modify future platforms on the basis of this information, modifying the thousands of existing platforms will be extremely costly and take several years - the alternative being leaving the U.S. Navy’s prime cruise missile vulnerable to electronic interference…

Considering the common threat perceived by a number of states from the Western bloc, Russia is likely either to share information obtained from the U.S. missiles with its defence partners or possibly even to attempt to sell specialised electronic warfare equipment to these countries.